Paul SchwerVon beiden Enden

Paul Schwer (*1951) intervenes with aplomb in existing architectures or landscape settings by means of his sculptural and painterly works. In doing so, his repertoire of forms and materials has always aimed at autonomous sculpture, because it is in sculpture that cultural and social conditions are reflected most succinctly. It all began at the end of the 1980s in painting, with representational motifs whose materiality seemed to dissolve in blurred-looking colour constellations. Then, in the 1990s, the artist was drawn into space, his pictures left the wall, and in the pattern he developed, winding in a spiral like a DNA helix, colour and light interlocked with space and movement. Works arose that appear raw, brittle, as if cobbled together, but that also glow with an aura and are quite simply beautiful. Stephan Berg (Kunstmuseum Bonn) recognised in them a mixture of poetic buoyancy and softness that moves back and forth between the poles of (constructed) stasis and (contingent) dynamism. Or, as Johann Hartle (Amsterdam) put it, quoting a song title of the Einstürzende Neubauten: “Keine Schönheit ohne Gefahr.” For Hartle, Paul Schwer’s work brings these two concepts together in a symbolism of space that fosters the spontaneity both of political utterance and of the appropriation of one’s own body. In this connection Hartle cites a bon mot of Sartre’s: the artist is like a dog without a cerebellum, one that has lost all security, all attachment and all certainty. With his heroic, self-extinguishing idea of artistic authorship in the moment of dangerous beauty, Paul Schwer confirms this characterisation of the artist with an adventurous heart!

Exhibitions:
Museum Ratingen, 29/6 – 30/9/2018
Museum Goch, 1/7 – 9/9/2018