Galerie
Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman is proud to announce its second exhibition
with Norbert Schwontkowski. It is an extraordinary pleasure for us to
present this artist on the occasion of the anniversary of the opening of
our Vienna gallery.
Norbert Schwontkowski is an artist of close
observation. His works revolve around the most various constellations.
They oscillate between being moved and the transitory state of waiting,
yet also between terror and wonder. His multifaceted oeuvre does not
captivate the observer thanks to the complexity of its subjects, though,
but thanks to the simplicity with which the artist captures the
putative intrusion of civilisation into spaces of absence. Depicting
seemingly trifling events and images, he moves with an uncanny sense of
balance between the terror of the deserted and the calm of being alone.
The
formal technique, all the while, stands in stark contrast to the
assumed messages for the recipient. These do not have to be registered,
perhaps there are no messages in the first place, and still the
observation might entail the realisation of a dissolution of
boundaries.
I am sitting on a rock beside the sea and in
front of me, on a rock in the water, four young cormorants are perching.
Neither pen nor paper nor a camera I have on me. I have no other choice
but to watch and take all this in, for later I want to paint it – not
as a picture of cosmic unity, rather like something arbitrary crossing
my path. So I am watching the movement of the waves, how small sharp
waves are sitting on the larger ones. The rocks, how small jagged spikes
are sitting on the larger ones. The plumage, anatomy and posture of the
birds I am watching, and I will forget them, just like the colour of
the sea, the smell – all that I will forget. But I will remember. This
fading memory is the subject and the content of my paintings.
“Beside the Sea,” Norbert Schwontkowski, September 2003
It
is not just in this text that Norbert Schwontkowski deals with fading
memory as subject and content. In his works, the artist also evokes the
melancholy that is rooted in remembering. A melancholy which does not
arise from the annoyance that something is in the past, but from the
realisation that memory can only ever be an image that will never match
the originality of the experience itself. And so memory becomes a
separate experience in the observer’s consciousness. And Schwontkowski’s
memory, of an event perhaps never experienced in real life, becomes the
recipient’s experience. Which turns the artist’s work into something
very special. It is not only artistic creation, his oeuvre as a whole is
a work of art.
Norbert Schwontkowski was born in Bremen, in
1949, as the son of a labourer of Polish extraction and a German mother.
After attending a Catholic boarding school in North Rhine-Westfalia,
for a short period he envisaged becoming a priest, but turned from this
endeavour when he entered puberty. After an apprenticeship as a window
dresser, he studied art at the University of the Arts in Bremen from
1968 to 1973, and from 1973 also art history. After that he travelled
extensively in the United States, Asia and Latin America, and worked for
longer periods in Vienna, India and Berlin. In opposition to the
zeitgeist, Schwontkowski decided to work alone as an artist and not to
join any groups. Since 2005, he has been teaching at the University of
Fine Arts in Hamburg.
Since the seventies, Norbert
Schwontkowski’s works have been shown at a number of important galleries
and art institutions. Selected solo exhibitions and contributions to
group shows since 1989: 1989 Das Nahe und das Ferne, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; 1990 Coup de Foudre, Haus am Wasser, Hamburg; 1993 Kunstverein Bremerhaven; 1994 Cairo Biennale; 1995 Kunstverein Bochum; 1998 Kunstverein Esslingen; 2000 Stedelijk Museum Het Domein Sittard, Netherlands; 2001 Wie die Herde zusammenhalten – wie den Tieren die Wolle nehmen, Brecht-Haus Weißensee, Berlin.
