Artist: Philipp Schwalb
Exhibition title: O ICH T
Venue: KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn, Switzerland
Date: February 9 – March 30, 2019
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn
In his second solo exhibition at Kirchgasse, Philipp Schwalb presents a series of new lands-capes and figure paintings. Each of these works consists of a landscape with specific characteristics (North or South Pole, desert, primeval forest), a group of naked figures and the respective activi-ties (collecting, reading on the phone, ice fishing, showing fruit) they perform. In their nudity, the characters seem exposed, isolated and self-centered. Place, figure and activity remain schematically separate sub-components, which – like concepts of argumentation – Philipp Schwalb unites in each work in a new distinctive pictorial entity. Each painting depicts a different constellation of the pictorial elements as a possible connotational context. Thus, these images can be regarded as both a new chapter in the evolutionary development of Schwalb’s figurative work, as well as pictorial artifacts of an artistic self-questioning. In the presentation of activity and engagement, of reception, communication and interaction, Schwalb’s own self-image as an artist is reflected, an image that is constantly reconfigured depending on the context (landscape, climate).
In keeping with this idea of akaleidoscopic self, the first “Steckborn Convention” will be held paral-lel to the exhibition’s opening and will include contributions by Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff, Anne Gruber, Séverine Heizmann, Yannic Joray, Robert Müller and Mathias Renner.
