Location: El Cerrito, CA
Medium: Painting, installation, works on paper
Website: juliaschwartzart.com
Julia Schwartz (b. 1965, Pomona, California) is a painter and installation artist who lived and worked in Santa Monica for twenty years before relocating to El Cerrito, California, where she now maintains a studio. Deeply influenced by years of psychoanalytic study and practice, her work moves between figuration and abstraction, treating painting as a form of somatic and emotional processing. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2005, with shows in Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam, Japan, Finland, France, and Cyprus. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, the New York Times, Huffpost, Fabrik, and Two Coats of Paint. She received the Foundation Prize for Painting from Peripheral Vision Arts in 2016 and was included in 1000 Living Painters. She was the Arts Editor for Figure/Ground Communication, where she interviewed artists about creative process, and has been an active lecturer on art. She has been a member of the artist-run project The Binder of Women and serves on the Advisory Board of Fine Arts Complex 1101 in Tempe, Arizona. Her work has been reviewed by Coagula Art Journal, Artweek LA, and Whitehot Magazine. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts.
Schwartz describes her unconscious as a kind of “virtual rolodex” — a receptacle of years of reading, dreaming, art, and world events — that unfurls into a painting through something like chaos theory: one small, seemingly unrelated movement affecting the piece as a whole. Her paintings begin in mark-making that creates a conversation between the artist, the canvas, and accumulated interior knowledge. Figures and objects undergo abstraction, disintegration, and disarticulation. She describes the process as visceral and nonlinguistic, and draws an explicit continuity between her work as a psychoanalytic thinker and her work as a painter. Her studio in El Cerrito, with its view onto the backyard garden, has noticeably shaped her most recent paintings — works structured around portals, gates, and windows, in which painting itself becomes what she calls “the opening door.”
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