Eric Schumacher

Diamonds Are Forever

07.05 - 14.06.2025

Nosbaum Reding | Projects

4 rue Wiltheim

L-2733 Luxembourg

For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Eric Schumacher presents a series of diagonal grid patterned sculptural reliefs alongside a singular brutalist form, characterized by a raw concrete-like texture. The exhibition title’s reference to the classic Shirley Bassey song not only refers to the diamond-like motifs at play in the artworks, but emphasizes the exhibition’s tension between ephemerality and permanence, further creating an arch nod to the dynamics amid communal and exclusive forces. 

The works are created through a labour-intensive process involving sculpted polystyrene brushed with layers of acrylic resin and silicone to produce negative mold-like forms of the original relief patterns. Messy and meticulous, Schumacher’s technique further involves gouging these intermediary layers away to leave a fragile final layer with a varying thickness whose eggshell-thin texture creates a playful topography. The resulting inverse spatial reliefs are ultimately imperfect and unpredictable; dynamic combinations of both decomposition and design. This gives a poetic ambivalence to the diamond patterned reliefs, qualifying the references, for example, to window grates, protective ironwork and tartan-like motifs as structures that question the capitalist-driven estrangement between public and private space.  For the abstract brutalist form, the rough texture emphasizes relations to post-war non-objective sculpture and large-scale public art while evoking the complex history of the urban public sphere, which is today under fire. 

Continuing the artist’s loaded invocation of the language of civic construction across time periods with precarious and evocative materials, the exhibition creates a set of minimal, performative signifiers that echo between contemporary urban forces, in which the artist’s use of an unconventional medium produces a critical and dynamic aesthetic. 

Eric Schumacher studied sculpture at ERG, Brussels and Edinburgh College of Art. The artist was nominated for Prix d’Art Robert Schuman in 2019 and was the recipient of Prix Arts et Lettres in 2020, during which time he was artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Schumacher has exhibited across the UK and Europe for many years and recently published his first artist monograph, titled “What Condition Our Condition Is In” with Distanz Verlag in 2024. 

Text by Rodney LaTourelle