Eckhard Schwarzenberger

Digital art & photography

Student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nürtingen with Günther Reger, Harry Walter, Armin Bremicker
Certified art therapist
Cultural scientist; initiator of the Topf & Sons memorial project in Erfurt
Various publications on the subject of art after Auschwitz, remembrance at a perpetrator’s site, outsider art
Establishing and managing a studio for artists who need assistance
Curator
Freelance artist since 1996

Installations & Performances

Within these image worlds of presumably mathematical precision I am particularly interested in the ambiguity, the ambivalence of interpretation patterns, the dichotomy between sharp and blurry elements, shaky shots and traces of movement, interference patterns, layers upon layers, distortions, pseudo-spatiality, effects and randomised operations. With these tools at my disposal, I make preliminary visual statements and develop an aesthetic that best suits my object of investigation.

These investigations brought forth what I call "generative photographic painting": Image elements branch out from a family tree of predecessors and forebears, are merged, gain autonomy over generations und completely emancipate themselves from their former images.
The familiar becoming unrecognisable, the blurring and merging of elements are essential for expressing transcience, including subjective lack of specificity and the constructive nature of memories and perceptions as well as the corresponding patterns that determine how we perceive the world.

Likewise, the investigation also leads to ever simpler, clearer structures, the basic patterns of aesthetic perception. Lines, surfaces, colours are not the result of abstraction.

Rather, they are part of an analysis of our way of looking at things. The poetics of the pixel understood as a kind of God particle of a virtual worldview that changes our relationship to nature and reality.

In contrast to Software Art or conceptual digital art, I am interested in reinserting pixel art into analogue forms of presentation, such as the panel painting, installations or sculpture. Embedding haptic and other sensual modes of perception into digital art is to re-open a communication channel for transferring our mental form or gestalt into our material existence. Another approach is to modify digital images using classical painting techniques.

The Digital Revolution is above all a revolutionary upheaval of our being in the world and its aesthetics. First with painting and sculpture, then with photography and film, it shifts our existential reality by leaps and bounds away from the plane of physical materiality towards the purely cognitive.

Besides my work as an artist I involve myself as a curator and exhibition creator, cultur scientist, art therapist, songwriter, loved and loving husband and last but not least a doting dog owner.