Julia Schwartz
tenderly cradled and lavishly hung
July 7 - August 11, 2018Tragedy transforms the quotidian into a quest for meaning making; ordinary things once belonging to someone irradiate into coveted and sacred assets. Life’s trajectory is no longer linear, and passage through time becomes a scatter of moments: nurturing fascinations with butterflies and milkweed, catching ghost cats in the corner of the eye, valiantly elongating time through foolhardy and repetitive tasks. Fooled by flutters of hope dancing too close to the edge, what w as, swallowed whole, lives in the rib cage of grief.
Julia Schwartz’s paintings on repurposed and recovered surfaces are an attempt to shift away from painful remembrance into a monument of play. Images of cats, girls, and dots decorate the surfaces of various objects; they evoke adolescent tenderness. Things live on in the reliquary, and it’s messy. They build on top of one another and grow to become larger than life: a construction and a site through which the dream of the now is realized. Through her work, Schwartz endeavors to make sense of the perpetual fragmentation of grief by insisting on the permanence of the hopeful light of what is.
Julia Schwartz lives and works in Santa Monica. Deeply influenced by years of psychoanalytic study and practice her paintings straddle figuration and abstraction. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Amsterdam, London, and Cyprus. Recent exhibitions include “Near to you” in Pelham, New York “Imaginary vacation on an imaginary lake” at galerie cerulean, and “Night Divides the Day” at PØST. Curatorial projects include "Place Made Visible" in Bushwick, NY (2014) and "States of Being” at the Torrance Art Museum in 2015 and "Black Mirror" at Charlie James Gallery (2017.) Schwartz received the Foundation Prize for Painting from Peripheral Vision Arts in 2016. Her work has been featured in Studiocritical, Ithaca MOMA, Fabrik, Huffpost, Whitehot Magazine, and Artweek LA. She has been included in New American Paintings and listed on 1000 Living Painters. Schwartz is the Arts Editor for Figure/Ground Communication, and is currently on the Advisory Board of Fine Arts Complex 1101, a Contemporary Arts Museum in Tempe, AZ.
