Paul Schwer
MORNING MARGARETA
16.01. – 06.03.2011

Paul Schwer first presented himself in the Kunsthalle in 2000 with a walk-in “color tension” made of orange and turquoise colored tulle. In 2005, as part of the Bremerhaven scholarship, he showed the image performance “Blast,” in which glass panes painted with buttermilk and pigments and placed on construction spotlights first shine as a colorful glowing floor relief before the glass shatters with a loud bang at unpredictable intervals. The aura of the heated image bursts and is transformed into a new, once again very aesthetic image made up of colored splinters and large fragments of glass and paint that overlap in a circle. While in the first exhibition the development of painting took place from a canvas picture into an atmospherically charged installation, “Blast”, although initially clearly alluding to the tradition of color field painting, tears the viewer out of meditative contemplation with the performative transformation through the aggressive bursting of the illuminated picture carrier.
In more recent works, the use of transparent materials and heat in the “Baos” leads to complex, intertwined forms. As a space-filling painting with extremely complex spatial folds, the color surface becomes a color body that no longer allows a simple dichotomy of inside and outside. In the most recent works - the “wall paintings” - colored light breaks through the wall and here too expands the painting from the surface into the room. As in “Blast”, light pushes and breaks through the picture carrier and, in an anarchic, elementary gesture, allows something of the force of the effect of original wall painting on the viewer to be guessed at. Here, too, something new is created through destruction. Color and light threaten to upset the balance of the assembled space. In the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Paul Schwer is now presenting “Baos” and “wall paintings” in a room-filling installation that envelops the visitor less atmospherically than physically.

Parallel to the exhibition in Bremerhaven, the Museum für gegenstandsfreie Kunst in Otterndorf is also showing an overview of the Düsseldorf artist’s work. The opening will take place on the same weekend.

Curated by Klaus Becké.