Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Ireland by German artist, Norbert Schwontkowski, entitled 'Zip Code'. Born in Bremen 1949 Schwontkowski continues to base himself in the Hanseatic city. He is the Professor for painting at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst Hamburg and has regularly exhibited his paintings in galleries and public institutions since the late 1970's.

Schwontkowski pictures operate very discreetly on the naivety of children's drawings, on the cleverness of caricatures and the power of a magical image. It is mostly simple figures and objects, man, woman, moon, lamp script, boats that dominate his works. They stand or drift in front of transitory colourful rooms, prepared to dissipate at any moment. A stream of emerging images, some melancholy, some ironic, which in silence bear witness to human existence. The artistic treatment of the matter - a mixture of substances consisting of litres of linseed oil, pulverised pigments, metal oxide, water, binding colours and bone glue, accentuate the scantiness and simplicity of the seized moments.

Norbert Schwontowski makes his own way between the paths of modernism and postmodernism. He has no need for programmatic statements; he simply paints as if the taboos of moderism had never existed. Rich in associations, his work references a wide array of painterly traditions, including but going beyond those of Romantic and Japanese art. In each of his exhibitions the viewer can sense what it means to have the whole range of artistic techniques at one's disposal.

Schwontkowski's most recent large scale exhibition 'Kino', travelled from the Kunsthalle Bremen to the Brandenburg Kunstsammlungen, Cottbus and the Kunsthalle Erfurt during 2004-05. This show contained over sixty paintings from the last twenty years and the book published for the occasion is also available. His paintings are in many major public and private collections worldwide.

For further information or images please contact Darragh Hogan / gallery@kerlin.ie