Šwierkiewicz Róbert - Like Water

The backbone of our exhibition are works made in Stuttgart between 1993-1995. This group of works, hitherto unknown to the Hungarian public, was made during the artist's several short stays in the city's Leonberg district as a guest of the Glaskasten (Glass Box) art house. It was here that the monumental compositions of the Trees series were created, drawn with mysterious gestures and powerful pastel contours, which can be interpreted as bonfires, sheaves, beams of light or merely lines of painterly force.

In the paintings of the Absolute series, Šwierkiewicz, enriched by his experiences of his travels in southern India, reaches the end point of his painting with minimalist, calligraphic gestures, from which he then moves away and returns to his figurative, symbolic-expressive colourism. The recurring, strongly contoured human figure in his series in acrylic is at once a ritual, almost magical representation, a vow or a totem carved in stone, while his colourful patterns evoke the world of Indian tapestries.

In the mid-1980s, he produced a series of collage paintings entitled Europe's Climatic Art. In them, he mixes a climatic heat map of Europe with his own experiences of the day and the local weather of Mount Chobain, resulting in a painting that is well beyond its time.