About

Eckhard Schwarzenberger

Digital photography and generative photographic painting form the focus of his artistic practice. Photographic sources are layered, merged and developed through successive transformations into independent pictorial worlds.

His work explores relationships between perception, memory and reality. Sharpness, blur, traces of movement and spatial layers are part of this inquiry, alongside clear lines, surfaces and colour fields. Digital images also take material form in prints, installations and sculptural works.

Works Collaborative projects

Student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nürtingen with Günther Reger, Harry Walter, Armin Bremicker

Certified art therapist

Cultural scientist; initiator of the Topf & Sons memorial project in Erfurt

Various publications on the subject of art after Auschwitz, remembrance at a perpetrator’s site, outsider art

Establishing and managing a studio for artists who need assistance

Curator

Freelance artist since 1996

Painting and graphics

My artistic career began with painting and installation art.

I was particularly interested in interactions between the artwork and an audience and I created experimental arrangements addressing the subjects of participation, self-efficacy and communication. The distinction and/or separation between art and the observer, between work and life made points of inquiry for experimental actions, installations and performances.

Installations & Performances

1994

Sign language; installation, performances, performance art (Nürtingen, Pszczyna (Polen))

1994

Light-sound-room; room-, sound installation (Nürtingen)

1996

Teleklang; sound installation (Nürtingen)

1996

SPOTKANIE; interdisciplinary art event (Nürtingen)

1997

Zeig mir deine Schokoladenseite; Performance (Nürtingen, Reutlingen)

1999

Room No 1; Room installation (Freiburg)

1999

Fluxusdesign; Object art(Freiburg)

2002

Gedächtnislabor; Object art (Berlin)

2015

Der Wal; room installation (Berlin)

2018

Vier Ecken - vier Perspektiven; room installation, tape art (Berlin)

2018

Nur ein Augenblick; video installation (Berlin)

2018

Antwort geben; video installation (Berlin)

Artistic practice

In recent years, I have increasingly explored digital forms of expression. Digital photography was my entry point into what is generally referred to as the Digital Revolution. Pixels are the basic elements of today's visual worlds that form our understanding of reality. Digital imagery allows me to tackle a wide field of questions about what makes experience truthful and authentic and about how to verify it within systems of reference.

Within these image worlds of presumably mathematical precision I am particularly interested in the ambiguity, the ambivalence of interpretation patterns, the dichotomy between sharp and blurry elements, shaky shots and traces of movement, interference patterns, layers upon layers, distortions, pseudo-spatiality, effects and randomised operations. With these tools at my disposal, I make preliminary visual statements and develop an aesthetic that best suits my object of investigation. These investigations brought forth what I call "generative photographic painting": Image elements branch out from a family tree of predecessors and forebears, are merged, gain autonomy over generations and completely emancipate themselves from their former images. The familiar becoming unrecognisable, the blurring and merging of elements are essential for expressing transience, including subjective lack of specificity and the constructive nature of memories and perceptions as well as the corresponding patterns that determine how we perceive the world. Likewise, the investigation also leads to ever simpler, clearer structures, the basic patterns of aesthetic perception. Lines, surfaces, colours are not the result of abstraction.

Rather, they are part of an analysis of our way of looking at things. The poetics of the pixel understood as a kind of God particle of a virtual worldview that changes our relationship to nature and reality. In contrast to Software Art or conceptual digital art, I am interested in reinserting pixel art into analogue forms of presentation, such as the panel painting, installations or sculpture. Embedding haptic and other sensual modes of perception into digital art is to re-open a communication channel for transferring our mental form or gestalt into our material existence. Another approach is to modify digital images using classical painting techniques. The Digital Revolution is above all a revolutionary upheaval of our being in the world and its aesthetics. First with painting and sculpture, then with photography and film, it shifts our existential reality by leaps and bounds away from the plane of physical materiality towards the purely cognitive. Besides my work as an artist I involve myself as a curator and exhibition creator, cultural scholar, art therapist, songwriter, loved and loving husband and last but not least a doting dog owner.