AN INTRODUCTION TO THE EXHIBITION “THREE DIMENSIONS”

By Silke Hohmann, Curator of Three Dimensions

I read the line “I paint for joy” on the website of Susan Swartz before we arranged to meet for a conversation. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Wasn’t there a greater imperative, a more urgent appeal that the artist ought to claim for herself?

Silke Hohman and Susan Swartz pictured at the opening of Three Dimensions at Galerie Noack in Berlin, September 2021.

And then shortly afterwards, I met a woman whose focus, warmth and humor made it abundantly clear how absolutely painting infuses her life. How it lent her strength during a period of illness, how it defined her day-to-day life, how its effect on her hand is so strong that she wears a brace while painting. And, what it was like to receive accolades late life, because there were so few successful women artists while she was still studying.

Susan Swartz’s paintings are informed – like all art – by the consciousness of a tradition. The point of departure in her painting was a visual vocabulary that was still palpably oriented toward the history of art in the 20th century – revolving around the way, given the precepts of modernity, nature could find its way onto a canvas.

“Landscape of Resonance” is the title of the series of earliest pictures in this exhibition. They are rhythmically structured portrait formats, that, in the language of painterly abstraction, search for that which has been experienced, has been seen. “Personal Path” is how the art historian Dieter Ronte has described Susan Swartz’s creative journey.

In this exhibition, rather than presenting her artistic development chronologically, we have chosen to see her work as a vibrant weave of certain motifs to which the artist returns without becoming stuck in repetition.

Within her different artistic phases, nature remains a constant, but emerges ever more clearly in the latest pieces; one could even say: in a joyful, playful way, as when she transforms the food that has helped her become healthy again into opulent compositions for the canvas reminiscent of Eat Art.

It means so much to her, Susan Swartz tells me, to be showing in Berlin. A city where she has heard that a lot of young women artists have studios and have successfully been able to establish careers. When you learn these things about Susan Swartz, then her proposition “I paint for joy” really does resonate with solemn earnest.