"I paint for joy", I read on Susan Swartz's website before we arranged to meet for a chat. I wasn't sure what to make of it. Was there no greater need, nothing more urgent for an artist to find out?
A little later I met a woman who made it clear with great concentration, warmth and humour how absolutely painting permeates her life. How it gave her strength during a phase of illness, how it determines her everyday life, how it challenges her hand so much that she wears a splint when she paints. And what it was like for her to only receive recognition late in her life, because there were hardly any successful female artists at the time when she was being trained.
Susan Swartz's paintings, like all art, are conscious of a tradition. The starting point for her paintings was a pictorial language that was still noticeably oriented towards the history of painting in the 20th century - towards the questions of how nature could be brought into a picture under the conditions of modernity.
Landscape of Resonance is the name of the series of the oldest pictures in the exhibition. They are rhythmically structured vertical formats that seek expression in a language of painterly abstraction for something experienced, something seen. Personal Path is what art historian Dieter Ronte has called Susan Swartz's artistic path.
In this exhibition, we do not trace her artistic development chronologically, but rather view her work as a vital network of certain motifs to which the artist returns again and again without ever standing still.
Nature is a constant in all of her creative phases, but it is particularly evident in her most recent works, where she brings food that helped her to become healthy to the canvas in opulent compositions in the tradition of Eat Art.
Silke Hohmann – curator of the Berlin exhibition Three Dimensions
The American painter Susan Swartz lives in Utah and in Marthas Vineyard/Massachusetts. In addition to her work as a painter, she is a co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival.
Her main themes are nature and contemplation through painting. The meditative aura of her works demands a different perspective; it is not about clearly defined pictorial themes or the elevation of abstraction to a pictorial subject. Susan Swartz reflects on the categories of beauty or aesthetics with the viewer on a very personal level.
After exhibitions in Salzburg, Koblenz, Budapest and St. Petersburg, it is now Berlin's turn.
We look forward to working with Susan Swartz and the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur e.V. in Bonn.
A catalog published by Distanz Verlag is available to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition can be visited Mondays to Fridays from 16.9. - 8.10. 2021.
For more information about the artist: