Art Hag

Mitchell-Innes & Nash currently has on view Ångstrœm, a series of dream-like and fascinating paintings by German artist Norbert Schwontkowski. The paintings are "[P]oetic, atmospheric, and loosely narrative, Schwontkowski's new paintings depict the artist and his world in a way that is at once cartoonish and melancholy..." (from the exhibit's press release). "Many of the paintings allude to electrical charges: another reference to the artistic process, as 'spark' is a metaphor for creation..." The show's title is inspired by physicist Anders Jonas Ångström, who had "a unit of measure for light waves" named after him. According to the press release, "Angstroem" can also be interpreted as a play on the two German words "angst" and "flow [electricity]".

Schwontkowski's paintings are surreal and cryptic. They seem to simultaneously want to tell a story and remain mysterious. As the artist revealed to Brooklyn Rail in a recent interview, "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 something 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 something else, something fresh and alive."

Schwontkowski worked in short, experimental, animated films, photography and writing before he reached 30 and then "started to concentrate" on painting. As he told Brooklyn Rail, "[T]hen when I was between 35 and 40 I had the feeling that suddenly I was a painter for the first time." Schwontkowski personally hand mixes pigments and paints for his works, and incorporates various materials (like copper, gold and marble dust) to create different textures and finishes on his canvases. The artist uses a palette primarily "of pale earth tones, blacks and grays creat[ing] a muted, subdued atmosphere..."

Schwontkowski was born and raised in Bremen, Germany in 1949. He teaches painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künst in Hamburg. Learn more at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and read Brooklyn Rail's full interview with the artist at Brooklynrail.org. Through January 9, 2010.

Alberta am Schwarzen See, 2009