ART-PRESENTATION: Susan Swartz -Personal Path

The underlying energy and tension to Susan Swartz’s work hints of her complex relationship with the natural world. Her decade long struggle with mercury poisoning and Lyme disease transformed her as an artist and as a citizen, the artist has used her experiences at the brutal hand of nature to paint its beauty with even greater dynamism.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Ludwig Museum Archive

“Personal Path” Susan Swartz’s solo exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest after its presentation at Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, continues a longstanding tradition within the network of Ludwig museums of hosting exhibitions in institutions of comparable profile. Susan Swartz’s exhibitions also chronicle the artist’s development. Her recent exhibition activity in Europe has inspired her to fashion thoroughly new, relief-like paintings now on view in Budapest for the first time. The spirituality of nature and painting as a contemplative process are the key themes addressed by Susan Swartz. To appreciate the meditative aura of her paintings, a different mode of seeing is required, since her work, instead of articulating clearly defined themes, rather interrogates the categories of beauty and aesthetics from her own deeply personal perspective. Susan Swartz explores the landscape through potent colors and richly layered abstract paintings. With her evocation of coastal splendor and mountain drama, Swartz follows in the tradition of the great German painters, 19th Century Romantic sage Caspar David Friedrich, and 20th Century icon Gerhard Richter. She is inspired by the intersection of art, nature and spirituality. Applying layer upon layer of paint onto the large-format canvases in abstract gestures, Swartz succeeds in capturing the beauty of the natural world in her work.

Info: Curator: Prof. Dieter Ronte, Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Müpa Budapest, Komor Marcell u. 1, Budapest, Duration: 10/12/16-29/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.ludwigmuseum.hu