Norbert Schwontkowski
Made the year before the artist’s death in 2013, Ohne Titel appears as a portrait of murky disquiet. The sitter's face, obscured by a Payne’s Grey pall that intercedes between viewer and subject, is rendered unknowable, yet full of feeling. One reads in the figure’s clouded countenance a psychological weight, imagining Norbert Schwontkowski to have had some knowledge of his coming death. The painting, though not necessarily a self-portrait (the title keeps its quiet), is revealing of the artist’s existential anxieties, which figured prominently across his practice. The apparent heaviness in Ohne Titel finds a moment of levity in the single brushmark given for a cigarette, seen hanging from the man’s mouth – brilliant white against the surrounding gloom.
b.1949, Bremen; d.2013, Bremen
A pervading sense of estrangement colours Norbert Schwontkowski’s figurative scenes. Pressed to describe the artist’s subdued palette, one unnamed writer recalled his “faintly soiled whites, corroded greys, the green of oxidised metal, rusted reds, soft ochres drained of warmth.” They continued: “Colour in Schwontkowski’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.” The artist’s characteristic muddying is modulated by hand-ground pigment paired with an assortment of additives, including light-sensitive chemicals that continued to shift in hue long after the painter had set down his brush. Bromide, iodide, silver oxide, nitrate – these, in addition to chalk, tea, antifouling, copper paint, bone glue, and other such unexpected additions that were worked into his oil medium. The result is at once sedimentary and staining, a gritty material presence and a fluid indeterminacy. Delineated with gestural restraint, the subjects in Schwontkowski’s paintings appear suspended in shadows, watchful and waiting. Yet for all the darkness of many such enigmatic scenes, each is shot through with an incandescent, glancing humour.