Fritz Schwegler

Since 1962, Fritz Schwegler has been recording his ideas in note form on small pieces of paper, which he christened Urnotizen or ‘primary notes’. Ideas, epigrams, pieces of prose - his artworks are based on many thousands of these accumulated notes. Thus, the relationship between word and image plays a central role in his work, the titles themselves providing us with a clue as to the artist’s delight in teasing out the possibilities of language. The painting Goldrandler, Schlüssel frei schwebt, depicts the image of a key on the left and a text on the right which contains a more detailed description of the object. Schwegler’s unusual linguistic turns of phrase, unexpected neologisms and esoteric formulations often puzzle more than they enlighten. His artworks are singular, occasionally hermetic and “in this instance”, the key on display has been placed in inverted commas, effectively not providing the recipient with means to “unlock” its meaning. Schwegler sees himself as a kind of “sound box charged with the job of passing on, amplifying, transforming and communicating input and should be judged precisely on the extent to which he might influence others with it” (Wolfgang Ullrich). As a result, he was a gifted, demanding and yet generous academy professor whose students included now internationally renowned artists, such as Thomas Demand, Katharina Fritsch, Gregor Schneider and Thomas Schütte.