Róbert Šwierkiewicz’s art can best be compared to water, which embraces, carries, dissolves, absorbs and lifts you. His art is based on everyday objects and actions, takes natural phenomena as its starting point and, filtered through his own experience, culminates in continuous creation.
In his person, art and life are definitively dissolved into each other. His works are not defined by genre or medium, nor by trends or tendencies. On the contrary, he breaks all the traditional categories of art history. His basic attitudes reveal an elementary experience of freedom, which always chooses the most appropriate form and medium for its own particular form of expression, regardless of current trends.
In the words of Ernő Marosi, Šwierkiewicz’s art is at once primitive and primordial, childlike and naive, and ultimately mystical, yet best described in terms of freedom. His work is characterised by Expressionism, Informel, Fluxus, Gesture and Mail Art, as well as traces of Arte Povera, Pop Art, Process Art and Lettrism.
But he ignored them all and transformed his everyday objects, his inner experience, into art. Like a flowing river, moving freely between cultures, religions and traditions, Šwierkiewicz combines in his ever-changing art the motifs that move him, whether he is working on the banks of the Danube, the Ganges or the Neckar.
The backbone of our exhibition is made up of works made in Stuttgart between 1993 and 1995. During this period, the artist spent several short residencies at the Glaskasten in Leonberg, a district of the city. It was here that the monumental compositions of the Trees series were created, drawn with suggestive gestures and strong pastel contours that can be interpreted as bonfires, sheaves, light trays or simply as lines of painterly force.
In the paintings of the Absolute series, Šwierkiewicz, enriched by the 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, heavily contoured human figure in his acrylic series is at once a ritualistic, almost magical representation, a vow or totem carved in stone, while his colourful patterns evoke the world of Indian tapestry.
In the mid-1980s, he produces a series of collage paintings entitled Europe’s Climatic Art. In these pieces, he mixes his own experiences of the day with the local weather of Mount Csobánc on a climatic heat map of Europe, resulting in highly personal works that are well ahead of their time.
A series of 12 large-scale lithographs, The Joy of Creation, clearly evokes the Biblical system of thought, but in its iconography is more closely linked to the symbolism of the Hindu belief system.
János Schneller