Reception for the Artist Thursday November 19th 6-8 pm

Mitchell-Innes & Nash will present an exhibition of new paintings by German artist Norbert Schwontkowski from November 19, 2009 – January 9, 2010 in their Chelsea space. This will be the artist's first solo exhibition in New York, and his second show with Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Poetic, atmospheric, and loosely narrative, Schwontkowski's new paintings depict the artist and his world in a way that is at once cartoonish and melancholy: a curvilinear building in "Musée des Arts" playfully references contemporary museum architecture while seeming to come to life. Many of the paintings allude to electrical charges: another reference to the artistic process, as "spark" is a metaphor for creation. The title of the show is taken from the name of physicist Anders Jonas Ångstrœm, after whom a unit of measurement for light waves was named. The name can also be read as a pun on both the German words "angst" and "flow [electricity]".

Norbert Schwontkowski was born 1949 and grew up in Bremen, Germany. He is a professor of painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künst at Hamburg. He has regularly exhibited in galleries and public institutions throughout Europe since the late 1970s. His work is represented in museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He is represented in Germany by Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin and Produzentengalerie, Hamburg.