André Schweers

(* 1963 Mülheim/Ruhr)

André Schweers

1963 born in Mülheim an der Ruhr
Studied art and geography at the University of Duisburg
Studied sculpture with Kurt Sandweg
Worked at archaeological excavation sites in Italy,
Greece, Turkey and France
Head of the paper workshop in the Department of Art at the University of Duisburg
Exhibition concepts and curatorial work

Since 1992 exhibitions, participation in exhibitions and projects in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, the Netherlands, China and the USA.

Works can be found in the collections of major companies and museums, such as the Musée des Beaux Arts in Tours, the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg and the NRW State Collection.

The sculptor André Schweers creates his sculptural objects mainly with paper pulp, incorporating other materials such as paraffin and pigments. However, the use of these specific materials does not directly involve a direct confrontation with the element of paper, but is understood in its materiality as an element of appropriation of trace, legacy and setting. The papers, or more precisely the paper masses used by the artist, are also sculpturally set and condense the different contents of the artistic work in elements of colour and form.

André Schweers works in series in which he often chooses titles that refer to areas used in archaeology, archiving or bibliography in order to express his specific content. This is the case in the "Bibliotheca conservata" series, in which André Schweers creates blocks of images that have the character of written panels. From the works created in the meantime, the artist compiles "secret libraries", as it were, for new exhibition contexts and presentations, with which he conveys the character of intimacy and historicity. The "writing panels" of the "Bibliotheca conservata" are strung together like an infinite archive of knowledge that takes on the quality of timelessness. The colourfulness of these picture blocks is highly differentiated, although the colour canon is homogeneous for each individual work. Precious pigments, as we know them from the Middle Ages, also stand here for the symbolic power of colourfulness such as blue, which has always stood for the spiritual in the tradition of art history.

The "Bibliotheca conservata" series is juxtaposed with a group of larger works entitled "Folianten" (folios), which convey the impression of large books and are even more intense in colour than the smaller series. Madder red or a lapis lazuli blue dominate the works and lend them a character of the past, preciousness and immateriality. The heavily embossed paper in the centre of the upright-format objects seems to carry the content and the wealth of knowledge and preciousness of the important artefacts within it and to release them from this centre in an impulse-like manner, almost as if in a glow. In contrast to the "Bibliotheca conservata" group of works, which contains the element of the "assembly" of different elements and thus also works with different materialities, André Schweers uses only pigment and paper pulp in the "Folianten" in order to achieve an auratic colour and material presence for each individual pictorial object. The concentration of colour, form and structure is reduced to a minimum here and at the same time increased in expressiveness. Nothing distracts the viewer's perception with different information and the gaze concentrates and condenses on the "knowledge enclosed" in the centre, which appears to light up in the traces on the pages. The pigmentation, which saturates the entire paper mass, also creates a glistening light that merges into an almost immaterial glow depending on the viewer's movement in the room.

André Schweers then developed the even larger "Prologues" from the "Folianten" series, in which he is also concerned with the relationship between the writing block and the surface and colourfulness. In these formats, the colour space is condensed at the periphery of the centre, becoming very delicate and diluted towards the actual edge of the picture or object, leaving the actual centre of the picture, which André Schweers calls the so-called writing block, in which the horizontal embossed traces, the paper and thus the paper mass break up to a brightness that outshines every other part of the picture object. In these "prologues" we repeatedly observe a condensation of colour matter as a picture within a picture and a simultaneous making transparent of colour pigments in relation to the edge and the centre of the work. This creates a colour space that provokes a special glow that almost annuls the material quality of the paper. André Schweers generally remains in the same colour, which he varies from light to dark, but in some works he also goes so far as to further heighten the centre with golden yellow pigment. The significance, the preciousness and the importance of preserved knowledge, which becomes thematically tangible in these works, thus finds its visual equivalent.

With his works, André Schweers always embarks on a kind of search for traces, in which he realises pictorial objects that cast the theme of the idea and the intellectual content into artefacts - in the double sense of meaning - and that bring the theme into aesthetic visual form. The book as a refuge of ideas but at the same time as a precious object of secret thoughts finds correspondences in his works and is questioned and reflected under the decisive conditions of artistic design according to the criteria of colour, form, materiality and space. The artist welcomes the structural quality and the processes that arise in the course of creation and repeatedly realises new visual and perceptual results in his own way.

You can read in his objects as in books, you can perceive and visually discover in his books as in works of fine art alone.

The text "Die Bibliotheca conservata" (Chapter House St Julien, Tours (F), April 2003) was written by Dr Gabriele Uelsberg, Director of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum.

André Schweers
Kanje III

André Schweers
Barajas III

André Schweers
Albufera II

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #168

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #170

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #164

André Schweers
Kanje IV

André Schweers
Barajas IV

André Schweers
Albufera I

André Schweers
Prolog

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #194

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #160

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #155

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #203

André Schweers
Cise I

André Schweers
Álbufera V

André Schweers
Fort

André Schweers
Barajas VI

André Schweers
Barajas V

André Schweers
Kanje V

André Schweers
Kanje VI

André Schweers
Kanje VII

André Schweers
Retiro II

André Schweers
Retiro

André Schweers
Breka

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #167

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #175

André Schweers
Bibliotheca conservata #157

André Schweers
Scripturale #79

André Schweers
Scripturale

André Schweers
Scripturale

André Schweers
Pozelle

André Schweers
Pozello II

André Schweers
Faltung orange

André Schweers
Scripturale #48

André Schweers
Scripturale #72

André Schweers
Scripturale #71