Norbert Schwontkowski (1949 – 2013, Bremen) is one of the most renowned and influential of German painters.
He applied his inexhaustible pictorial inventiveness both to fundamental questions of the human condition and to the absurdity of daily life. Throughout his career he created works heavy with humour, but always poised at the edge of an abyss. He possessed a virtuoso command of insinuation and the surreal, articulating a language of quiet estrangement.
His works were made using hand ground pigments, mixed with various materials to yield a multitude of tex- tures. Light sensitive chemicals such as silver oxide, iodide, nitrate and bromide, added to the pigments, creating shimmering and multifaceted surfaces, that continue to evolve over time. The works are abundant and alive.
Schwontkowski’s palette remains one of his most enigmatic tools. Faintly soiled whites, corroded greys, the green of oxidized metal, rusted reds, soft ochres drained of warmth—the artist tones were not just decorative, but also psychological. They perform a kind of emotional tuning, establishing a tonality that is never directly illustrative, yet always atmospheric. Even his brighter usages arrive in dusty haze, never quite resolute. Colour in Schwont- kowski’s works is not applied to describe form but to fog it, mute it, slow it down, to enable the viewer to grasp at its coldness.
Schwontkowski’s figures often appear in partial engagement with the world—a seated man, head tilted, not quite present; a floating object whose logic is unclear; a table surrounded by absence. Yet the absurd finds gent- le footing here, not as farce, but as a fact of being. The humor is always at the periphery, never overworked, and always glancing.
This is a world in which shadows are just as important and real as the objects and shapes that produce them. While Schwontkowski resisted direct self-portraiture, these works suggest a deeply introspective practice: a self embedded not in representation, but in the texture of things. His art does not proclaim the ego; it traces its eva- poration. What remains is not absence, but intimacy.
“Most of my paintings come from a dream, which is never fixed. It is more like the feeling when you are traveling on a train without a destination, or in the early morning when you just wake, when you are still in between a dream and the thoughts of what you have to do for the day-like what sort of shirt and pants you will wear and who you’ll see for lunch, and so on. Essentially, it comes from a moment when there is not so much control of your thoughts or what you could actually see. Your eyes are open and you think you can see whatever’s in front of you, but in fact there is so- mething from this corner of your vision, which somehow melts together and becomes something you can’t identify whatsoever. I think this is the way poetry works, by allowing things to come together and bloom and become so- mething else, something fresh and alive.” Nobert Schwontkowski, 2019
Schwontkowski studied painting at the University of the Arts in Bremen and the University of Fine Arts Ham- burg. Following teaching positions in Hamburg, Bremen, and Greifswald and a position as a guest lecturer in Braunschweig, he was appointed professor of painting at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in 2005. His work has been shown across galleries and museums internationally, and is in the permanent collections of, amongst others; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of New Zealand, Hall Art Foundation, Rubell Museum, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kunsthalle Bremen, Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Pina- kothek der Moderne, München, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Kunstmu- seum Den Haag, Weserburg Bremen.
