Susanne Schwieter

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

Painting is where I follow images as they migrate between digital and physical space. I am interested in what happens when an image is translated from one system into another — from a screen to paint, from pixels to gesture, from a fleeting online image to a material surface. My paintings often begin with found digital images, screenshots, or fragments collected through online circulation. Rather than reproducing them, I treat them as unstable material. Through processes of painting, erasure, layering, and transfer, the images lose their original function and become something else. Each translation alters their identity. Across different works, silhouettes, edges, and colour fields reappear in changing constellations. Forms migrate from one canvas to the next, sometimes dissolving, sometimes condensing into new bodies. Individual paintings therefore exist both as autonomous works and as part of larger sequences that continue to evolve over time. My background in stage design continues to shape how I think about painting: not as a fixed image, but as a time-based medium in which perception shifts through movement, repetition, and spatial relationships. Painted forms extend into sculptural objects, and return again as echoes within the paintings, allowing images to circulate between two and three dimensions. I see painting as a place where images remain volatile — never fixed or singular, but continuously transformed as they pass through different materials, technologies,...

Artwork