SUSANNE  SCHWIETER

I am very interested in visual language and techniques in the commercial field. I try to combine the two by rethinking the medium of classical painting and treat Photoshop, inkjet printing, powder coating or aluminium bending as extensions of painting. I try to narratively tell stories about the painting process itself in other media. You could compare it to a novel that becomes a play or a film by translating it into a new medium and creating a certain distance in the technique that is actually trying to tell the same story. In this sense, my work is characterised by the constant analysis of the development of the pictorial in our daily environment. Against the background of the flood of images we deal with every day, I am interested in the question of what technical progress, what digital thinking and what an image archive like Google means and does to us in today's social context for our reception of images. How does digital thinking find an analogue equivalent? What remains and what emerges? I work at the interface of painting and sculpture. After 15 years as a stage designer, I later turned consistently to the visual arts. The works often extend to room-sized sceneries that enter into dialogue with each other and form a web of relationships. My works are abstract, partly minimalist, but always start from photographic, found image material that I process. I look for the motifs very specifically everywhere in daily life - in Google, in digital media, books, trade journals or advertising. I am primarily interested in what man produces, in everything that shows our connection to the world, in "cultural assets" in the broadest sense. When I decide on a motif, it has both conceptual and formal reasons and far-reaching consequences. I work in evolving series of up to 20 works that go back to one motif. So far, there are exactly 3 such original images in my work: a block of marble (as THE historically classical sculptural material), the image of the tongue speaking, and a kiss as an intimate moment of communication. They are all images that contain a potential of the unexploited and are connected with a hope or longing. I alter the found image material digitally and also analogue, partly intentionally, in some cases arbitrarily, by deleting, copying, enlarging, duplicating, overpainting and distorting to a high degree of abstraction, in order to then paint or print it. Photographed, it finds its way back into the digital and is the basis for further works. A typical example for my approach was the last solo exhibition DOMINO (Galerie LOOCK Project Space, Berlin 2022). Its title refers to my working practice: The basic rule of most domino games is to alternately place stones with the same number of points next to each other. I used this to illuminate the working process itself. I have shown work from 3 years as a continuing series. Every week one had to go and a new one was added. The five works shown are all part of the Cruiser series (2017 to present), the starting point of which was a Google image of a block of marble in the quarry in Carrara: Cruiser 5, Pointer, Pretender, Meet Me Halfway and MHA cast. The original motif of the marble can hardly be experienced visually any more, yet it always serves as an anchor to reality and also contains traces of photographic elements such as gradients or a veining. The juxtaposition of two works each opens up a perspective on their creation. Identity is a changing concept here, transformation and transcendence the theme. Form wanders like a performer from scene to scene and is found again in each work, only altered: in works as different as high-contrast, dynamic prints over 200 cm high or a curved aluminium sculpture, there is a close connection in form that reveals a sometimes unexpected kinship. A block of marble that was intended for a sculpture has now become a jagged, meandering silhouette. In the pixels of the prints and their sequels, the marble is literally still in there and at the same time tells of our evolving relationship with technology. I am driven here by the great possibility of art, through purely sensual, emotional experience, to create surprising insight on an ideational level and to leave the visitor with "new" eyes. My work investigates processes of shifting identity and impermanence of images, exploring how form emerges, how language becomes sign, how fleeting images solidify. Berlin, October 2022