Peter Nowotny

Peter Nowotny, the artist and engineer, is fascinated by Daphne: the woman who escaped impending rape by transforming into a plant. What concerns him is not so much the criminal offense – after all, he is not a jurist – but the process of metamorphosis or transformation. His new exhibition is not coincidentally titled “Brain/Stomata.” These are the places or organs where communication and transfer between the external and internal worlds take place. Not only do we recognize ourselves – an ancient romantic topos – in the other, but we become the other or the other becomes oneself. We are composed of what we are not. This is called metabolism. One could also say “I is another” – in a somewhat broader, more physical sense than Rimbaud once envisioned.

Who knows how much Nowotny is enthralled by the Nobel Prize for Louise Glück, who listens to him and learns how “nature writing” in all its variations captivates him, who takes seriously what he says: that he follows the trail inherent in all this and that his own work changes as a result, is then surprised when seeing Nowotny’s new works. Because Nowotny remains – fortunately! – Nowotny and, somewhat pointedly, one could say, the inner and outer nature, the “material,” the matter are voids for him. Or more radically: their heightened, even more intense presence manifests itself in their consistent absence. Just as he once learned from the Jewish and Islamic high cultures, the religions of image prohibition, that one must not desecrate and trivialize God, that which is most important to one. Which one inevitably does when one makes the highest, the transcendent, that which deliberately eludes our gaze, even our words, the object of our imagination. One must, even if it is difficult, refrain from wanting to hold onto or even “just” write down what one longs for. Therefore, in Nowotny’s magnificent art, everything is a sign, a reference. Abundance appears by deleting the superfluous. “Becoming empty of all emptiness” is what Master Eckhart called it, the highly influential mystic from whom we also owe terms like “real,” “reality,” which have long become self-evident to us.

Peter Nowotny is a master of metamorphosis; of permanent transformation, without which our world would not exist. Whoever wants to possess everything will inevitably become poor; whoever only sees themselves will become a perpetrator of violence. Theodor W. Adorno, who saw in nature and art a final refuge in the administered world, recognized in love the ability to perceive the similar in the dissimilar. “Home” is only where everything is different – and may remain so.

Helmut Hein

Philosopher and cultural journalist