The new paintings by Christian Schumann presented in Bogen 52 at carlier | gebauer confront us with multiply layered canvases, which saturate the eye with a fantastic, almost hallucinatory imagination. Works such as “Inside”, 2002, or “Eating” 2002/3, share Schumann’s fixation with falling or decomposing figures, with bodies seemingly both emerging and receding into the canvas, as though they were simultaneously living and dead. They are a kind of “disjunctive figuration”, and like other works such as “Being” or “Building”, they comment on modern society and its destructive, self-devouring tendencies. This imagery, which filters both high and low culture, comics and fictional literature, is formally presented in very impressive overall, non-hierarchical pictorial surfaces. These works are in great contrast with the subject matter and the formal qualities of his most recent record drawings, also included in this exhibition.  Schumann’s work has been shown in international institutions such as the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA, The Dallas Museum of Art and the Whintey Museum. Forthcoming exhibitions will be at the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York (in a collaborative work with Gary Panter) and a solo drawings exhibition at the Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas, TX.