Two years later, he moved his studio to New York. Appearing on the Big Apple’s art scene, his “Stone People” found their way into the American public sphere through exhibitions in galleries, at art fairs such as the Art Expo, and in the Visual Arts Museum. The result was numerous acquisitions by private collectors.

In 1980 he began work on a monumental cycle of 100 paintings – his life’s work, “Friedensdom” (“Cathedral of Peace”) was to point the way towards a future worthy of humanity. Following his return to Vienna in 1986, “Living Structures” increasingly found their way into Schwertberger’s work. The organic and the artificial began to appear in his visual worlds, initially as separate elements, polar opposites, but which soon began to interact with one another. The interplay of abstract mathematical and physical spaces became an interesting challenge for DE ES.

More recently, however, the painter’s oeuvre has experienced something of a renaissance: when artist Mimi Staneva discovered a folder of freehand drawings from DE ES’s Swiss period, this long-forgotten treasure became “stimulating stone”. And so, in his most recent works, the painter has engaged both technically and thematically with the period in which he used stone as a symbol for matter. The result is a group of truly masterful paintings, which don’t just follow on from the successful period of 1971–1980, but integrate the artist’s original thoughts along with his personal and artistic development over the last few decades.

“DE ES Schwertberger’s work was always about life, or, to be more precise, about questions to do with the purpose and origin of life. In this sense, he is a stubborn, anachronistic genius, who has spent 50 years creating virtuosic paintings, circling this time-honoured subject with all the perseverance of a Zen master, trying always to get a bit closer with new groups of works and cascades of pictorial variations,” says painter Gottfried Helnwein.