RICHMOND, VA.- The Page Bond Gallery presents Constructing From Life: Paintings by Peri Schwartz, Friday, March 4, 2016 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run March 4 to March 26, 2016.
New York artist Peri Schwartz uses the objects of her surroundings as vehicles for formalist experimentation. In her latest work, she transforms the familiar space of her own studio into two-dimensional abstract compositions. In so doing, she takes the practice of working directly from life to its limits, blurring the lines between realism and abstraction. With a disciplined eye, Schwartz exploits the shapes and angles around her for their formal relationships, turning draft tables, book stacks, and rows of paint-filled jars into enticing symphonies of line and color. The striking interplay of natural and reflected light allows viewers to identify basic objects and textures in these scenes, yet the details and edges seem to dissolve into blocks of pure color and casual brushstrokes. Faint gridlines weave in and out of the compositions, flattening the illusion of spatial depth even further. In both the studio interiors and the bottles and jars series, layers of painterly gestures build upon one another, revealing Schwartz’s decisions to add, subtract, and rearrange objects as she works. Consequently, these images often have a tentative, unfinished appearance that emphasizes the artistic process over product. Neither stagnant nor contained, this body of work thus poses an ongoing, open-ended question about the artistic possibilities to be discovered in even the simplest objects and environments.
Schwartz has exhibited still lifes, interior scenes, and portraits nationally and internationally for over thirty years. Trained in a variety of mediums at Boston University and Queens College, her oeuvre encompasses paintings, monotypes, etchings, and drawings. Her work can be found in permanent collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the New York Public Library; the British Museum, London; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; the Staatliche Museum, Berlin; the Bibliotheque Nationale de France; and most recently The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The exhibition is on view in concurrence with Resting On Is Relying On: Sculpture by Jere Williams.
