Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | Click here to join mailing list
Andrew Schwartz’s practice explores the possibilities of abstract visual language using a vocabulary of color, form, light, and materiality. Collaborating with chance and the alchemical properties of paint, he employs a range of studio techniques in an improvisational flow of repetition and variation to create new visual outcomes. Each painting becomes a site for impressions, residues, and subsequent excavations.
Schwartz’s recent work draws on the incidental beauty of daily visual experience, never discriminating between the monumental and the mundane. His paintings also allude to those microscopic and macroscopic abstract worlds brought into focus through the aid of technology. In an age flooded with ephemeral images all vying for attention, Schwartz is particularly interested in the role of painting as a format that demands patience and slow, intimate looking from its audience.
Andrew Schwartz received a BFA with concentrations in painting and sculpture from Cornell University in 2010 and an MFA in painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2016. Schwartz has exhibited his artwork at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC); Deanna Evans Projects (NYC); and Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA); among others. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
The books mentioned in the interview are: (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism).
[…] Andrew Schwartz lives and works in New York where he, too, is locked down as the pandemic stretches on. He says his habit always is to have his head down and be working and so this time has been an opportunity for the artist to dig in deeper. The baseline anxiety he experienced at the outset made it difficult to tap into his creativity but, like many artists, he feels he is now more able to focus and becoming more used to this time. He is working in four different sizes at the moment, making smaller works that in some ways serve as studies in formal aspects such as color and composition, and larger works (30 x 22 and 50 x 40) all on paper. To hear more about his experience working during this time, including a discussion of how the paper he’s using lends itself to his current process, listen to the complete interview. […]
[…] Andrew Schwartz lives and works in New York where he, too, is locked down as the pandemic stretches on. He says his habit always is to have his head down and be working and so this time has been an opportunity for the artist to dig in deeper. The baseline anxiety he experienced at the outset made it difficult to tap into his creativity but, like many artists, he feels he is now more able to focus and becoming more used to this time. He is working in four different sizes at the moment, making smaller works that in some ways serve as studies in formal aspects such as color and composition, and larger works (30 x 22 and 50 x 40) all on paper. To hear more about his experience working during this time, including a discussion of how the paper he’s using lends itself to his current process, listen to the complete interview. […]