SCHWONTKOWSKI, NORBERT
1949 Bremen–2013 Bremen

Title: "Im stillen Wald".
Date: 2006.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 150 x 150 cm.
Notation: Signed and dated verso top left: Schwontkowski 2006. Titled verso at the top centre of the stretcher: *In the Silent Forest*. Also marked: NS/M 693.
Frame: Framed.



Provenance:
- - Gary Tantinsian Gallery, New York (according to the consignor)

- Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia



- An atmospherically dense forest scene, serving as a prime example of Schwontkowski’s unmistakable, poetic yet enigmatic visual language

- An outstanding, pared-down composition featuring a masterful interplay between suggestion and void

- Created during a highly sought-after period of his oeuvre, following his artistic breakthrough



Norbert Schwontkowski is one of those artists who only achieved well-deserved fame later in life. Born in 1949 in Bremen-Blumenthal, he studied fine art in Bremen and Hamburg and subsequently spent years traveling through America, Asia, and Africa. These experiences had a lasting impact on his independent perspective. It was not until his 2004 solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen and with the support of the Berlin gallery Contemporary Fine Arts that he became known to a wider audience; in 2005, he was appointed to a professorship in Hamburg.

Schwontkowski’s work defies clear categorization: a poetically dense visual language unfolds between figuration and suggestion, reality and absurdity. In subdued, often monochromatic color schemes, scenes emerge that resist immediate comprehension. Everyday motifs appear in unsettling constellations, permeated by subtle irony and existential gravity. Art-historically, his work can be situated at the intersection of New Figuration and surrealist painting.

The painting “In the Silent Forest” (2006) depicts a deserted forest scene of quiet presence. Dark tree trunks structure the flat pictorial space, while the ground is rendered in subdued browns and greens. Clearings open up between the trunks without creating any clear sense of depth; the space remains deliberately ambiguous. The reduced, almost stage-like composition dispenses with narrative action and condenses the forest into a state between tranquility and latent tension. The soft transitions in the painting reinforce the impression of the indeterminate. Within Schwontkowski’s oeuvre, the work represents those landscape depictions in which humans are present only indirectly. The natural space becomes a projection surface for inner states of mind and points to the balance between external reality and inner imagination that is central to the artist.



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#Norbert Schwontkowski #Figurative Painting #Germany #Post-War Art #2000s #Contemporary Art.







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