exhibitions | Schwieter

typesetting loss, falschrum books, 2024

Typesetting Loss is a long poem by Joseph Jude—a meditation on shapes and patterns, as they relate to the movement of people in and out of one’s life. Jude’s personal record of longing centers on a mid-twentieth century factory sign, visible from the apartment in which the story is set. The sign prompts a reflection on Jakob Erbar’s famous geometric type design, which, in a moment of profound uncertainty, offers the narrator a sense of order and stability. Loose-leaf, unbound pages, the form of the book-object meets the feeling of unmooring and displacement that come with loss. Jude’s poem is accompanied by drawings by Susanne Schwieter, and designed by Ayman Hassan.

Projekt 17, space25 Basel, 2024

What impact do the constant flow of images and the growing image archive have on our society? What does technological progress look like, and what consequences does it bring? Susanne Schwieter’s works explore digital images and their dissemination. The works are based on the same source motif—a Google image of Carrara marble. The motif is appropriated, alienated, and transformed; through photography, it returns to the digital world and back into the analog; a continuous exploration of images emerges, created from images of images. The works represent a close connection between classical painting and photography. Through the systematic reworking of the motifs in multiple processes, they are abstracted and play with the viewer’s perception and memory. The memory of the origin is barely recognizable in the images, yet it remains present and preserves its traces, serving as a reminder that something existed and continues to exist in another form. The meaning of the individual motifs shifts through an “artistic” appropriation. This experimental approach presents images as traces of time and testifies to the infinite possibilities of pictorial reality.

Text: Elwira Spychalska
Foto: Peter Steinmann

1 RWW, Galerie Loock, Berlin 2022

Pointer / Cruiser 5
Domino, week 1
Foto: Christin Oehler

1RWW – 1 Room, 1 Work, 1 Week –expands the exhibition space to include the dimension of time, thereby drawing attention to each individual work. From January through December 2022, a total of 12 female artists will be invited to freely interpret the exhibition’s title and concept for one month each. On a weekly rotation, a work will be displayed that references the previously shown works and engages in a dialogue with them. Thus, 1RWW is both a solo and a group exhibition.
1RWW begins in January with the work Domino by Susanne Schwieter, and additional artists will be announced month by month. This exhibition project unfolds over the course of a year and will be documented in a final publication in January 2023.
The idea for 1RWW traces back to the exhibition BILD-Malerei, which Friedrich Loock conceived in 1995 for the Galerie Wohnmaschine, a private gallery founded in 1988 in his East Berlin apartment. The focus there was on artists working in Berlin in the early 1990s who were discussing the concept of painting. In 1997, the exhibition BILD-Malerei was acquired by the Berlinische Galerie. 1RWW now expands the scope of contemporary painting from Japan through Europe to the United States.

Current Quarry, Studio BvdL Berlin, 2023

Relic ( ecru )

Against the backdrop of the ever-evolving relationship between humans and technology, the exhibition CURRENT QUARRY illuminates processes of identity shift between analog and digital images. These shifts manifest in linguistic, visual, and physical forms.

Artist SUSANNE SCHWIETER addresses the question of what technological advancement, digital thinking, and a growing image archive mean and achieve in a societal context. The close interconnection between the analog and the digital plays a pivotal role.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the long-running series of works titled “Cruiser,” a set of large-format paintings that emerged from a Google image of a marble block in the Carrara quarry. They are abstract, the original motif no longer decipherable, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of images, language, and ultimately identity. These works engage with questions of legacy and copyright in the digital age, as well as the act of appropriation.
Schwieter’s approach is intuitive, with motifs emerging in an ongoing process. Each work within a series consistently references a shared photographic source. Shapes and silhou- ettes move from one work to the next, akin to actors in a theatrical performance. This dynamic continues in the CURRENT QUARRY exhibition, where the works span all the spaces across the two levels and engage in dialogue with one another.
Text: Maj van der Linden

Women in Abstraktion / Susanne Schwieter

Women in Abstraction, Alfa Gallery 2023

NL / the fading / TAL

Alfa Gallery is pleased to present, “Women in Abstraction”, a group exhibition of new works by 45 artists. In their latest exhibition, Alfa Gallery aims to celebrate the complexities of abstraction. In not only its physical manifestation; but through its meaning, history, and energy, as well as, the artists who create it through their own unique lenses.
As a result of the lasting appeal of the Abstraction Movement, there is now an increased desire to uncover and recognize the women of the many periods of Abstraction throughout history. Vanguards like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler — whose groundbreaking work was largely misunderstood — have paved the way for the abstract artists of the past century. In 2022, being an abstract painter holds a highly dynamic and diverse set of meanings— especially when compared to the pioneers in the previous century. Each artist approaches material, shape, color, and space in ways that uniquely reflect their own cultivated experiences and ideas.
text: Alfa Gallery

Regionale 22, Kunsthalle Baselland ( CH )

Shh
Foto: Gina Folly

Can painting be a museum, light in a room, traces of nature? What role do digital media play in a medium that has traditionally been created primarily through analog processes? How can painting be reimagined when neither the classical materials nor the tools are being used anymore?
Thirteen artists from the tri-national region work within an artistic genre that has long needed to be redefined—above all, conceptually. Thus, painting today is much more than its familiar definition. This is evidenced by the diverse, large-scale, and mostly expansive works on display at the Kunsthaus Baselland.
Through an international perspective on the theme, featuring artists who work in Switzerland, Germany, and France and who, in turn, embody a lived internationalism in the region, the exhibition offers a multifaceted insight into a medium that remains very much alive and relevant today.
Text Ines Tondar

open-ended photography, Galerie Robert Morat, Berlin 2021

Small Drift

open-ended photography2 aims to expand the gallery program through a multiplicity of forms and possibilities, all rooted in photography but inte- rested in a conversation about the mutability of the medium as a defining condition. seven berlin-based artists are contributing works that transcend documentary approaches commonly associated with photographic images. their experimental access manifests itself in digital, abstract as well as material transformations of the medium. building on the notion that a trans- lation of reality into another medium will always change that reality, the exhibition guides its audience away from the predominant memorial aspect of photography to open up a more independent way of looking and thinking in images.
text and photo: Tobias Kappel