Focus: Norbert Schwontkowski

At the end of 2019, some 210 individual works by Norbert Schwontkowski from the Brigitte and Udo Seinsoth Collection were transferred  permanently to the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art. Thanks to this generous gesture, the museum is able to present a permanent artist‘s room dedicated to Norbert Schwontkowski, which supplements major works from the Seinsoth Collection with additional loans and is given a new emphasis once a year.

Norbert Schwontkowski (born 1949 in Bumenthal, died 2013 in Bremen) is considered a master of painterly and graphic compression. His works  revolve around the great themes of human existence, conscious of their transience and fraught with doubt. His pictorial narratives are melancholy and bizarre, poetic and humorous at the same time. The  human being is at the centre: searching, questioning and often lonely in  the midst of an almost empty ground painted in earthy colours. The artist often supplements his pictorial poetry with a linguistic level or musical impulses.

The collection of Brigitte and Udo Seinsoth concentrates, in addition to the well-known canvases, especially on works on paper. Although the  artist always considered them to be equal to painting in his work, they  show the rather unknown Schwontkowski. The Weserburg‘s collection thus enables both new discoveries and a representative overview.