Norbert SchwontkowskiBlind Faith

OK, let the Last Judgement come! In view of the painterly oeuvre of Norbert Schwontkowski (1949–2013) a fundamental question arises: what form of painting is still possible at all in the wake of technological change and the losses associated with it, both of one’s own worlds of experience and of one’s own bodily identity? Florian Waldvogel, director of the Kunstverein Hamburg, examines this context in “Hell in Slow-Motion,” his contribution as editor of this volume, which at last makes the work of the popular north German painter accessible again in book form, the most recent publications having been out of print for some considerable time. Alongside this, however, there is indeed also the “Schwontkowskiesque,” as Jens Hoffmann, deputy director at the Jewish Museum, New York, emphasises in his essay. On the one hand this can be the painted dry wit that Richard Prince recently ennobled, on the other the seemingly Kafkaesque scenario of doom, painted darkly and in thick impasto: the smog in the sculpture park, for instance, through which an avalanche of cars rolls, or a highway losing itself in the sinking sun. It is this tragicomic streak of the canvases that may well provide the richly coloured attunement to … the Last Judgement.

Exhibition:
Kunstverein in Hamburg, 26/1 – 14/4/2013