Art In Flow
Torsten Schumann. Vermilion Confusion
For Torsten Schumann, the urban environment is an inexhaustible repository of enigmas, confusions, harmonies and incongruities. With subtle humour and an absurdist’s disposition, the artist captures the fragments of contemporary life in which people, actions, objects, and environments momentarily coalesce to form suggestive inner logics of paradox, oddity and interconnection.
This is particularly apparent in his current series Vermilion Confusion, created in China between 2020 and 2022. This series of decontextualised scenes from urban life - presented as formally and conceptually-linked diptychs - intertwine with and amplify both their adjacents and the images that precede and follow them, merging to become a complex, montaged whole in which narrative, plausibility and significance are playfully teased out and short-circuited. It is precisely by dissolving this boundary between appearance and reality that Schumann creates a photographic imagery that evokes a healthy skepticism towards the medium’s supposed evidentiary functions, while enacting an empathetic curiosity for the particular and amusing in the unspectacular and every day. In turn, this this approach characterizes the artist’s stance toward all political, cultural and ideological boundaries encountered in his global practice and lifestyle. (Txt. Wolfgang Zurborn)
Torsten Schumann is a German photographer living in China since 2020. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Context Gallery of the Filter Photo Festival Chicago, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins; Soiz Gallery Passau; Galerie Sehnsucht Rotterdam and Jarvis Dooney Gallery Berlin. They have also been represented at festivals such as Circulation(s) Paris, HeadOn Sydney and Kaunas Photofestival. Schumann has received several awards for his photographic work, such as the Arte Laguna Prize, the PDN Photo Annual Award and the OPUS Magazine Photo Prize. In 2016, his book More Cars, Clothes and Cabbages was published by Peperoni Books. The Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection New York have works by Schumann in their art collections.
