Norbert Schwontkowski Essay

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Norbert Schwontkowski was a German painter who born in Bremen-Blumenthal in 1949 and died in Bremen in 2013. He studied painting at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Bremen and became a professor of painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künst at Hamburg. He had his first solo exhibition in 1973 at the art show Böttcherstraße in Bremen. From the muted colour palette to the surreal landscapes, Norbert Schwontkowski captured the isolation in human psychology. He likes to play with the unconscious and the surreal. Norbert Schwontkowski’s paintings mostly present a simple figure or object, sometime a scenery or landscape. He identified with the idea of poetry in his paintings, each of the paintings is a story being told. It's a sudden moment of happening, appear like a dream with no beginning and ending. As he came from the German Romantic and Nordic tradition, he believed that this is how painting works, as in a sense of poetry. He paints mostly from his …show more content…

For example the building with many windows, some of which are closed and some are wide open, in Hotel De (2005, fig. 6), the lift boy who stop the lift door from closing in Hotel Malewitsch (2010, fig.7), or the ship that sailed close to the shore in Alter Hafen (2006, fig.8). These places or object are where people gather. They resemble, come and go. Hotel is a temporary stop for people who travel, and taxi, train or ship are the transportation. These paintings talk about human existence. There is a loneliness as people pass through these place restlessly. They left no traces of their presence, only the feeling of isolated and distant. Norbert Schwontkowski was a traveler who observed the world. He travel through foreign countries and meet the people living in them. He collects stories and at the same time wonder the presence of human and existence of human and his

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