LUMEN
Regine Schumann, Siegfried Kreitner, Jan van Munster, Julius Stahl
Vernissage: Friday, January 16th, 2026 from 6 to 8 pm
Matinee: Saturday, January 17th, 2026 from 12 to 4 pm
Exhibition from January 16th to March 28th, 2026
“Look at the light, and you are fascinated - how you are prevented from grasping its boundaries on either side.”
Dan Flavin— “Light magician and poet of minimal art” [1]
In our new exhibition LUMEN, we bring together one female artist and three male artists who have made light and its “incomprehensibility” the central theme of their artistic practice. They explore its physical and optical properties, use light self-referentially as a material, and thus create an immediate art experience anchored in time and space.
Like the “light magician” Dan Flavin in the mid-20th century, Siegfried Kreitner also uses industrially manufactured neon tubes for his “minimal kinetic” sculptures. Electric motors move individual parts of his sculptures at minimal speed, thereby changing their shape and light emission in a way that is initially barely perceptible. Most of them are man-sized steles that seem to literally “breathe” light.
In contrast to Siegfried Kreitner, Jan van Munster, who died in 2024, had the thin light tubes made in individual shapes. Some trace the waves of an EEG, which van Munster had recorded from his brain waves. The so-called “brainwaves,” but also his geometric shapes with targeted artistic interventions, glow in different colors. They represent a form of light art that has been using neon advertising since the 1970s to convey their individual artistic message.
Regine Schumann, on the other hand, uses external light sources for her objects made of fluorescent acrylic glass. In doing so, she draws on traditions of the Light and Space movement since the 1960s as well as concrete color field painting. In daylight, the edges of her works shine particularly brightly, and depending on the incidence of light, a colored shadow is created. In black light, her works shine in their entirety and transform the entire room into a colorful Gesamtkunstwerk. Light and color are inextricably linked in Regine Schumann's work.
A new group of works by Julius Stahl deals explicitly with the “incomprehensibility” of light: his luminograms on the theme of “entropy,” first developed in 2025, are created solely from light and show a “space” whose boundaries we cannot grasp. This effect is created by shades of gray that seem to extend into infinity. In addition to the luminograms, two resonance objects are also on display in the exhibition: surfaces of light that are set into vibration by sounds and take on spatial forms on the walls of the gallery.
Katharina Brauch
[1]Manfred Schneckenburger, „Skulpturen und Objekte: Amerikanische und Europäische Minimalisten“, IN: „KUNST des 20. Jahrhunderts“, Ed. I. F. Walther, p. 528
