Reinhold Schwenk

Reinhold Schwenk was born in Göttingen, Germany, at the end of World War II. His visual arts journey began with an apprenticeship to a design studio in Karlsruhe at the age of sixteen. His assignments included painting enormous billboards for movies like Gone With The Wind and creating store window décor for local businesses. Later Reinhold attended the Werk-Kunst-Schule Wuppertal, a Bauhaus-style art school, where he learned all aspects of graphic design.

With encouragement from school friends and teachers, Reinhold made a big decision: in 1966 he left his home, moved to New York City and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts. His talent was immediately recognized by a professor who then landed him a job at Doyle Dane Bernbach, the most influential ad agency of the era. In no time, Reinhold rose from studio assistant to Art Director to Creative Director, producing award-winning ads in print and television for international giants like Volkswagen, Audi and American Airlines, and for cultural icons like The New York Shakespeare Festival.

After thirty years of focusing on client goals instead of his own, Reinhold quit advertising, moved to a farmhouse in bucolic Bucks County and took up painting at the atelier of still life artist Frank Arcuri. There Reinhold learned to create light, shadow, and form with oil paint on canvas. And, like other artists who started in advertising and moved on to painting, his graphic design background profoundly informed his painting style: one of distilled composition and bold focus. His first show of still life paintings at the JS&B Gallery in NYC was a sell-out. He went on to paint landscapes, flowers, animals, abstracts: whatever intrigued him.

Inspired by his artistic hero, Gerhard Richter, Reinhold refused to be confined by one style of art. He kept pushing beyond his comfort level, looking for new concepts and new techniques. The striking element of his œuvre is that he preferred to create groups of work rather than single paintings. Multiple images allowed him to synthesize and tell a more layered story. One such series is Painting Cancer, seven large landscapes depicting his personal experience overcoming cancer. These paintings are on permanent display at The Mount Sinai Hospital, Hess Center for Science and Medicine, NYC.

In 2018 Reinhold designed and oversaw the construction of his own art studio. This inspiring new space allowed him to spread out and work big. The paintings he created there realized images of the Georgia coast he had been collecting for several years: vast flat beaches transformed twice a day by tidal ebb and flow, infinite horizons, dramatic skies, exquisite light, and human figures enjoying, confronting, and sometimes conflicting with Nature. His studio became his laboratory, and he explored new techniques, creating a wall of graphic images with poured paint and textures.