André Schweers

(* 1963 Mülheim/Ruhr)

André Schweers

1963 born in Mülheim an der Ruhr
Studied art and geography at the University of Duisburg
Studied sculpture with Kurt Sandweg
Working stays at archaeological excavation sites in Italy,
Greece, Turkey and France
Head of the paper workshop in the Department of Art at the University of Duisburg
Exhibition concepts and curatorial work

Since 1992 exhibitions, participation in exhibitions and projects in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, the Netherlands, China and the USA.

Works are in the collections of large companies and museums, such as the Musée des Beaux Arts in Tours, the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg and the Landessammlung NRW.

The sculptor André Schweers creates his visual art objects mainly with paper pulp, incorporating other materials such as paraffin and pigments. The use of these specific materials, however, does not directly involve a direct engagement with the element of paper, but is understood in its materiality as an element of appropriation of trace, legacy and settlement. The papers, or more precisely the paper masses that the artist uses, are then also set in a plastic way and condense the different contents of the artistic work in colour and form elements.

André Schweers works in series of works in which he often chooses titles that refer to areas used in archaeology, archiving or bibliography to express his specific content. This is the case in the series "Bibliotheca conservata", in which André Schweers creates blocks of pictures that have the character of written panels. From the works that have been created in the meantime, the artist compiles "secret libraries", as it were, for each new exhibition context and presentation, with which he conveys the character of intimacy and historicity. The "written panels" of the "Bibliotheca conservata" are strung together like an infinite archive of knowledge that takes on the quality of timelessness. The colourfulness of these blocks of pictures is very differentiated, although homogeneous in the colour canon for each individual work. Precious pigments, as we know them from the Middle Ages, also stand here for the symbolic power of colourfulness, such as blue, which has always stood for the spiritual in the tradition of art history.

The series of paintings "Bibliotheca conservata" is contrasted with a group of larger works entitled "Folianten" (folios), which convey the impression of large books and are even more intensely coloured in contrast to the smaller series. Madder varnish red or a lapis lazuli blue dominate the works and give them a character of the past, preciousness and immateriality. The paper, heavily embossed in the centre of the upright-format objects, seems to carry the content and the wealth of knowledge and preciousness of the important artefacts within itself and to release them from this centre, as it were, almost as if in a glow, like an impulse. In contrast to the group of works of the "Bibliotheca conservata", which carries the element of the "assembly" of different elements and thus also works with different materialities, André Schweers uses only pigment and paper pulp in the "Folianten" in order to achieve an auratic presence of colour and material for each individual pictorial object. The condensation of colour, form and structure is here reduced to a minimum and at the same time increased in expressiveness. Nothing distracts perception through different information and the gaze is concentrated and condensed on the "knowledge" "enclosed" in the centre, which seemingly shines out here in the traces of the pages. Also in the pigmentation that saturates the entire paper mass, a glistening light is created that merges into an almost immaterial glow depending on the viewer's change in space.

From the series of "Foliants", André Schweers then continues to develop the even larger "Prologues", in which he is also concerned with the relationship of the writing block to the surface and to the colourfulness. In these formats, the colour space condenses at the periphery of the centre, becomes quite delicate and diluted towards the actual edge of the picture or object and leaves the actual centre of the picture, which André Schweers calls the so-called type block, in which the horizontal embossing marks, the paper and thus the paper mass break up into a brightness that outshines every other part of the picture object. Again and again in these "prologues" we observe a condensation of colour matter as a picture within a picture and a simultaneous rendering transparent of colour pigments in relation to the edge and the centre of the works. A colour space is thus created that provokes a special glow that almost cancels out the material quality of the paper. In doing so, André Schweers usually stays with the same colourfulness, varying it from light to dark, but in some works he also goes over to additionally exaggerating the centre with golden-yellow pigment. The significance, the preciousness and the importance of the preserved knowledge, which becomes thematically tangible in these works, thus finds its visual equivalent.

With his works, André Schweers always embarks on a kind of search for traces, in which he realises pictorial objects that cast the theme of the idea, and of the intellectual content, into artefacts - in the double sense of meaning - and that bring the theme into aesthetic visual form. The book as a hoard of ideas but at the same time as a precious object of secret thoughts finds correspondences in his works and is questioned and reflected under the authoritative conditions of artistic design according to the criteria of colour, form, materiality and space. The structural quality and the processes that arise in the course of creation are welcome to the artist and are repeatedly translated into new visual and perceptual results in his own way.

In his objects one can read as in books, in his books one can perceive and visually discover as alone in works of visual art.

The text "Die Bibliotheca conservata" (Chapter House St. Julien, Tours (F), April 2003) was written by Dr. Gabriele Uelsberg, Director of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum.