About the work
A man, almost stylized as a stick figure, moves across the small-format canvas, which is primed in a dark, blotchy grey. Identified as a blind man by his cane and glasses, he walks unperturbedly across the picture surface, concentrating on his forward movement. His gray clothing barely stands out against the background. He does not notice the deep black cloud hovering ominously above him. A bolt of lightning discharging from it seems to be about to strike his body. His back is illuminated, the tip of his black beret stretches grotesquely towards the lightning like an antenna. The story is not resolved; the man remains trapped between life and death.
“The blind man only hears the thunder” is the title's commentary. Is it a symbol of a hopeless situation? But you have to ask yourself the question: If there is no escape, given the obvious lack of any place that could offer protection from the storm, is it not a kindness of fate not to see the possible final lightning strike and all the flashes before it coming?
About the artist
born 1949 in Bremen-Blumenthal
died 2013 in Bremen
Norbert Schwontkowski studied free painting at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Bremen and at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1968 to 1973. After teaching at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig and the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald, Schwontkowski took up a professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in 2005.
“Norbert Schwontkowski is considered one of the most important representatives of contemporary figurative painting and a master of painterly condensation. Often painted in dark, earthy tones, his pictures convey a sense of melancholy seriousness, which can nevertheless take the form of bitterly humorous motifs. His poetic pictorial themes play with the surreal, the unconscious and the suggestion of stories that he consistently never tells to the end.
Schwontkowski always places people at the center of his pictorial world: looking out of the window in search of something, racing through tunnels in a car or jumping from stone to stone - always in danger of slipping away, of losing themselves. He shows man as a seeker, for whose disorientation he has found striking pictorial formulations, occasionally influenced by Romantic painting. From a distance, his staggering figures are reminiscent of Casper David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, but Schwontkowski is the creator of an undeniably unique pictorial world that needs to be deciphered.
in: Text about the exhibition: NORBERT SCHWONTKOWSKI, SOME OF MY SECRETS, 31.10.2019 - 16.02.2020, Kunstmuseum Bonn