Exactly on Emil Schumacher’s 100th birthday, August 29th 2012, we will open the exhibition „Painting is Enhanced Living“ - Emil Schumacher in international context. Here, his work will enter into a dialog with his great European and American contemporaries, whom he had admired and been interested in for a number of different reasons. Among them are European painters like Pierre Soulages, Wols, Lucio Fontana or Antoni Tàpies, but also several great painters of the American abstract expressionism like Robert Motherwell or Franz Kline. In precise juxtaposition, some 60 mostly large-scale pieces from the 1950s through the 1980s convey the power of painterly expression with which each of these painters brings his own personal dynamic, radicality and determination to the painting. To Schumacher, every painting meant an unforeseeable adventure. „My painting is nothing but a form of enhanced living,“ he said as early as 1960 – nothing but, and nothing less.