Stefan Rasche

CUTTING, BURNING, ETCHING

Finding images through headstrong means

For a long time, Walther Schwiete’s artistic production has been defined by two fundamental aspects: on the one hand, by a pronounced collecting activity, which applies to everyday, often curious motifs, including signs, emblems, pictograms, all finds from the real world, kept in the artist‘s archive until they are used one day. And on the other hand his work is characterised by an experimental understanding of materials that can be described as a kind of artistic ‘engineering’, for Walther Schwiete has repeatedly developed his own processes and technologies in dealing with the various materials of his work groups, always with the aim of their pictorial use. He even builds the tools required for this himself, another trait that sets him apart as an inventive artist-engineer.

The two aspects come together, for example, in the so-called PE drawings he has been producing since the 1990s – and which represent a constant in his multimedia work to this day. These are hybrid constructions, half image, half object, created from the tiniest building blocks of polyethylene (hence the name PE). He cuts these into figurative shapes and processes them into marquetry, before fusing them together with an iron. This creates a smooth, modular plastic skin, which is mounted onto fibreboard later. What is particularly noteworthy here is that an old-master technique, inlay work, is transferred to a modern, industrially manufactured material through a unique adaptation.

As for the motifs in these panels, they consist primarily of graphic signs and figures – icons from the said fund, which are almost always processed in variations. These include speech bubbles, bright red tattoos on a blue background, and ornamental war rugs, modelled on Afghan motifs and featuring weapons and military objects. Later, works of a distinctly painterly character are added, whose atmospheric effect is based on the layering of opaque and transparent elements. To be discovered here, for instance, there are smoking chimneys in a sulphur-yellow landscape or car headlights at night reflected in the wet tarmac – just as if one were standing on a bridge and looking down into the dense evening traffic in the rain. AufStreife*, the latest series of polyethylene works, presents itself in a surprisingly abstract manner - whilst following an intrinsic process of recycling: the colourful strips and offcuts, collected waste from decades of production, are transformed through their reuse into polychromatic, purely artificial pictorial compositions.  

[*double meaning: Streifen = stripes / Auf Streife = on patrol, roaming about]      

Another group of works are the so-called ‘brandings’ - and these too can be described as an ongoing program for image generation, although they are based on a completely different materiality and technique. These works are, in fact, painted or drawn with fire, for which the artist crafts steel motif stamps, which he then heats and burns into plywood panels of various sizes. An open flame is also used in the process; with it, the light surfaces are scorched, a process that can be applied in varying degrees, from slight shading to deep, charcoal-black burn marks. This sometimes resembles a photogram or an X-ray image, and such a comparison is apt precisely because the sensitive wood is literally ‘exposed’ by fire and heat. And here, too, free, painterly works have recently emerged without the use of burning irons, a variation particularly evident in the ongoing series of so-called ‘All-Weather’ brandings: somewhere in distant, deserted places, between sky, earth and water, they depict dramatic cloud formations and other light phenomena with astonishing plasticity and illusionistic variety.

In addition to small and medium-sized formats – including the diverse ‘Knives’variations – Walther Schwiete also produces monumental fire walls, which are constructed as a room dominating modular sculpture comprising numerous panels. They are structured by a multitude of oval shapes, which is reminiscent of the perforations of film strips, but in the overall view also evoke a gigantic, dark façade with hundreds of small windows. This creates an illusion of depth, meaning that one looks through the openings into a bright room in which various phenomena reveal themselves: a flame, smoking chimneys, a car with its headlights on, a ghost, a skull or a hand grenade – motifs, that themselves revolve around light and darkness, and indeed more than that: they convey a menacing, inhospitable atmosphere, giving rise to a kind of catastrophic scenario, almost as if from an apocalyptic film. With its many peepholes, the fire wall appears not least as an optical apparatus, a modern image-making machine designed to produce ever-new, enigmatic sensations. Of cource one may also associate archaic elements with these iconic fire-works, such as the shadow plays in Plato’s cave-allegory, which are addressed here as the origin of all imagery in a manner that is as poetically ambiguous as it is formally concrete.

In Paderborn, the large angled fire wall also has a reverse side, which brings a third group of works into the show. It is covered with polystyrene, another material that Schwiete has repeatedly worked with over the years, using it to construct sculptural objects or large pictorial works that are finished with silver lacquer. This creates an etching effect, as the silver paint eats into the grainy surface, being applied either with a brush or more selectively – drop by drop. A similar pattern of circular craters, surrounded by a silvery relief, is also evident in the two-metre-fifty-high polystyrene cube that the artist has placed on the first floor gallery. A massive, rejecting structure, one might think, yet the block is suspended inside, meaning it does not touch the floor, and as one moves around it, the draught sets it into slight, gentle swaying. But as the cause of this movement remains hidden, the irritation of perception is all the greater.

Furthermore a huge polystyrene biscuit is leaning against the wall, which, with its 52 teeth, corresponds to the original ‘Leibniz’ from 1891, still produced today. Once again, both the indentations along the edges and the small holes on the surface are caused by the corrosive lacquer. In doing so, this biscuit-object takes on distinctly curious features not only through the choice of material, but also through its extreme enlargement – and at the same time, it combines two influences of international post-war modernism, namely: tendencies of Pop Art with its penchant for the monumental representation of everyday objects, as well as unmistakable references to the abstract-minimalist sculpture of the 1960s. A world-art-biscuit, then? Perhaps. Above all, however, a bulky, hybrid structure that bumps into the corner or gets stuck in the room.

Despite the diversity of the series of works, Walther Schwiete’s exhibition presents a closely interwoven iconic cosmos. This stems from a seemingly endless reservoir of logos and signs, an evolving system of motifs and pictorial elements that nevertheless relies on comparable strategies of transformation and visualisation. For whatever the artist brings to view takes shape in a thoroughly related manner, as the actual image penetrates the surface and works its way into the materials. In other words: it is a matter of concrete, physical inscriptions brought about by similar physical processes - using the iron, the branding iron, the corrosive silver lacquer. This lends the image carriers both their depth and plasticity, transforming them into material storages, into analogue screens. Moving beyond conventional techniques, Walther Schwiete has thus created his own polyphonic instrumentarium for image-making, which he continues to employ in and constantly expand to this day.    

Stefan Rasche, in: Walther Schwiete, Eigen±Sinn, Ausstellungskatalog | Exhibition catalogue, Städtische Galerie in der Reithalle, Paderborn 2026  

…For something to be perceived at all is for it to be perceived as part of that situation. [1] This assertion by the American art historian Michael Fried, made in his much-cited critique of Minimal Art, seems to prove true in a pointed way when viewing Walther Schwiete's large-format, cubic styrofoam objects. Too large to be captured at a glance, one moves along or around them, setting the ball-bearing blocks, seemingly hovering just above the ground, into slight motion by the resulting air suction. The perceptual irritation that ensues can be compared to the feeling one experiences on a stationary train when another train slowly starts moving on a neighbouring track. There is no doubt that the styrofoam objects are perceived by the viewer as part of the situation.

That Walther Schwiete's works tie in with some aspects of Minimal Art and develop them further has already been explained by Friedrich Meschede  - with an allusion to a famous text by Donald Judd - using the example of a series of wall objects from 1989. [2] This basic assessment remains relevant to the artist's later and current, diverse and sometimes more "expressive" production. For example, Judd's observation that in the mid-1960s half or more of the best new works were neither painting nor sculpture, but more or less related to one or the other, also applies to the styrofoam objects mentioned at the beginning. Their surface was treated in various ways with a silver etching varnish, which transforms it into relief-like structures or hemispherical cavities. Thus, when certain principles established since Minimal Art, such as seriality and the use of materials from the field of technical production - for example fluorescent tubes, metal sheets, or plastics - are continued by Walther Schwiete, this is never done in an unbroken way, but always with decisive twists: For example, neon tubes are formed into empty speech bubbles, which - mounted as wall works in interior or exterior spaces - only receive their possible "contents" from the context of their installation.

It is not only the selection, but also the use of materials that is specific to the work of Walther Schwiete. From the industrially produced materials, he usually chooses those that lead a rather unremarkable existence in everyday life and can mostly be processed by the artist himself, such as styrofoam or polyethylene beads, which are actually made for simple children handicrafts. Schwiete uses them in elaborate manual work to produce small-format wall objects with glossy surfaces that do not deny their "low-tech" manufacturing process; the structure of the PE beads remains visible upon close inspection. Instead of a perfect industrial finish with its fetish-like hard, reflective surfaces, here the focus is on an individual experimental approach, which locates Schwiete‘s activities in a realm which lies somewhere between that of a tinkerer and that of an engineer - to use Claude Lévi-Strauss's phrase. That means, existing materials and technologies of industrial society are used, not to submit to their standards, but to pursue individual and headstrong purposes with them.

Occasionally, moments of technical, economic or individual failure are highlighted. For example, the visual bracket of this catalogue is a historical illustration of the so-called Bessemer saloon ship, named after its inventor, the English engineer and businessman Sir Henry Bessemer. In the 1870s, Bessemer's tendency to seasickness led to an invention to keep the passenger compartments of a ship in a horizontal position without swaying, even in heavy seas. Bessemer's saloon ship, which was to set new standards in transportation between England and the continent, remained a utopia, an unfinished project: its development, which had necessitated the founding of a shipping company, swallowed up such large portions of Bessemer's assets that he was never able to prove the functioning of his invention in practice.

The drawing, which shows a cross-section of the ship's hull, is therefore as much a symbol of inventiveness and technological optimism as it is of the abysses of economy; motifs that also echo in other works by Walther Schwiete, such as the series Kurse und Gebirge* (2000), made of polyethylene inlays - which, among other things, puts a series of stock market curves into the picture - and the video WeltHölzer** (2002), which deals with the rise and fall of the matchstick king Ivar Kreuger. [3]

While the emergence of Minimal Art historically corresponded to a mood of social awakening as well as to a growing importance of trademarks and corporate identity programs, Walther Schwiete's current works fall into the cultural and economic context of market downturn and persons in self-employment, stock exchange losses and the no-logo debate. And so Fried's dictum quoted at the beginning - that something, in order to be perceivable at all, must be perceived as part of the situation - can also be understood in an expanded sense and sharpen the view on Walther Schwiete's works.

Catalogue text, in: Walther Schwiete, MAS|SEN|TRA|EGH|EIT, Ed: Galerie Stefan Rasche, Münster 2004

1 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1967), in: Minimal Art. Eine kritische Retrospektive, ed. by Gregor Stemmrich, Dresden und Basel 1995, p. 334–74.

2 Friedrich Meschede, Spezifischere Objekte, in: Walther Schwiete, Catalogue, Galerie Monika Hoffmann, Paderborn 1989, no p. ref.

3 WeltHölzer (2002) cf. the text by Stefan Rasche, in catalogue s. above.

* Kurse und Gebirge [stock prices and mountains]

** WeltHölzer [former label for monopoly matches until 1983, literally WorldMatches]