Regine Schumann — Space for Light

After around 30 years as an antique shop focussing on Art Deco, British Colonial style and curiosities from bygone times, "the Watson" is transformed into a gallery for contemporary light and media art.

Galerie Watson opens its doors with an exhibition by Cologne-based artist Regine Schumann (born 1961). In her works, Schumann focusses on light effects created by fluorescent materials. Among other things, she uses different coloured acrylic panels, which she assembles into three-dimensional bodies based on Goethe's theory of colours and which transform themselves and their surroundings under the influence of black light. Her works can be found in public spaces, worldwide solo and group exhibitions as well as in renowned art collections. Schumann's career began as a painter at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. It was only by chance that she later discovered fluorescent materials and from then on worked with the third dimension. Schumann sees the surrounding space and its transformation through black light as an important part of her work.

Galerie Watson is showing a selection of Regine Schumann's wall works, sculptures and previously unseen works on handmade paper. The rooms of "Antik Watson" are deliberately staged unchanged: the sooty edges of the objects that have adorned the walls for decades, the yellow wall paint, the holes and quirks of the rooms, and the wear and tear on the floorboards, which have become visitor paths along the furniture over the years, have been left in place to thematise the transformation between past and future. The exhibition thus acts as a harbinger for future projects that are to be realised under the name Galerie Watson throughout Hamburg and beyond.