Overview
Susan Swartz's pictures combine dried blossoms, flowers, plants, and fruits with acrylic impasto for sumptuous bouquets on canvas. Harking back to the Eat-Art tradition, the artist's multifaceted oeuvre bridges the gulf between Romantic representations of nature and Expressionist abstraction. The motif dissolves into exuberant explosions of color and vibrant flowering meadows.
Swartz deconstructs the depiction of nature, charting a way back to before nature and before the act of painting to enter the spiritual sphere. On the aesthetic plane, her oeuvre probes visual forms and genres. Having gradually shed the constraints of mimesis and painterliness, she turns her attention in her most recent works to the physicality and process of painting as such. Contemplating the clay-like textured surface of her timeless pictures, the beholder joins the artist on an intimate voyage into the soul. Nature in all the phases of its unceasing creation and the artist's own life shaped by a series of health setbacks inform her work throughout.
The monograph SUSAN SWARTZ—THREE DIMENSIONS is published on occasion of the exhibition of the same title at Galerie Noack. With essays by Alexander Borowski, Jürgen Großmann, Silke Hohmann, and Dieter Ronte.
