Norbert Schwontkowski

Norbert Schwontkowski (b. 1949) has a big following among people who like their art anxious and strange. He has has a career that makes for boring reading – born in Berlin, art school in Berlin, then professor of art in Hamburg – and he did not make much of a splash until he was in his mid 50s, around 2004. For the next decade he had shows all over Europe, and most of his work that you see online dates to the 2004 to 2015 period. Above, Trying to Understand the World, 1994.

The work that first drew me to Schwontkowski, Prehistory, 2006.

Alberta at the Black Sea, 2009. One critic wrote,

Schwontkowski’s landscapes are often described as in-between places, occupying the “gap between the mythical and the mundane” He renders these places in a milky light using pulverized pigments, linseen oil, metal oxide, binding colors and bone glue. Neither here, nor there, the solitary character enveloped in endless expanse, anchored by a lonely landmark. And often moving towards a light. Schwontkowski senses the potency in empty space. Foucault’s insistence upon emptiness as essential in contemporary times resonates: “It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance.”

Observatorium, 2009. Another critic:

Schwontkowski does not presume to know the contours of our anxiety: he just shows us his, refusing to elevate it, and supposes that ours is equivalent. 

Inner Garden, 2006

The Architecture School of Tomorrow, 2011

The End of the World, 2005