About the artist
Norbert Schwontkowski (1949–2013) may well be one of Germany’s best-kept secrets, but his poetic work is slowly gaining more and more admirers outside his native country as well. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, which he encountered on one of his trips to Asia, he seeks the aesthetics of the moment. This gives rise to works that seem to touch upon stories without ever concluding them. Sometimes his paintings carry a heavy existential theme; other times they depict absurd situations from everyday life, such as a man rummaging through his refrigerator in the dead of night for something to fill his rumbling stomach. But the subject is always the human being seeking enlightenment and inspiration in a grim world. Thanks to Schwontkowski’s dry humor, his works never become depressing. The 2021 exhibition “Everyone Wants to Go Home” at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag brought together some seventy paintings and more than forty sketchbooks from international collections and was realized through a collaboration between the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Kunsthalle Bremen, where it was previously on view.