Village Star-Revue: Seeing Great Art Free in Downtown Manhattan

Susan Swartz, The Awakening, 2009, Acrylic on linen, 72 x 48 in.

by Steven DiLauro, November 2024

Susan Swartz’s exhibition is enjoying an extended stay at Georges Bergès Gallery in SoHo. Visitors will be able to view the vibrant, intriguing works now on display until November 20. Both a nature and abstract painter, in the same compositions, Swartz’s work is provoking discussion worthy of a major talent, which she is. The curator of the exhibition, Donald Kuspit, one of America’s most prominent and respected art critics and art historians, called Swartz “the best abstract nature painter alive today.” The exhibition is titled Renewal.

Apart from a painting of birch trees on view immediately to the left as one enters the gallery, a relentless artistic energy and concern for the importance of beauty and the power of color, are the overall first-blush sensations. However, upon close inspection, the canvasses reveal a painter’s cry from the soul, a desire for the gestural nature of brushstrokes to escape the flatness of the painting surface, which flatness is part of the essence of the birch trees painting.

Not unlike Schnabel

To emphasize this breaking free, Swartz employs flower petals, mushrooms, leaves, seeds, and other organic detritus from nature. These organic elements are chemically stabilized with paint and clear lacquer. Swartz has written and spoken about Holy Scripture as a major source of her inspiration. In the presence of the paintings incorporating these elements from nature, Genesis Chapter 1 verses 29-30 came to my mind.

Freeing the painter’s gesture here is not unlike Julian Schnabel’s efforts to expand the artistic gestural in his famous plate paintings. Both artists, by challenging the boundaries of the painted surface, discovered an innate power in their efforts that might have previously only been hinted at. For Swartz, this change inapproach to the canvas came at a critical personal juncture.

In mid-life, Swartz suffered the double whammy of Lyme disease and mercury poisoning from eating fish. While suffering and recovering, Swartz’s relationship to both nature and paintings underwent a dramatic upheaval. It was during this time that her work became much more abstract. For example, there are smaller square paintings in which the trees are barely suggested. They are abstract subjects rather than being portrayed figuratively as in her previous work.

Susan Swartz, Sunflowers 3, 2023, Acrylic & mixed media on linen, 24 x 48 in.

Swartz works in series and, in doing so, mines the cycles of nature and comes up with artistic cold. These series—Sunflowers; Evolution of Nature; Nature’s Bouquet; Shimmering Impressions; and Emerging Bouquet may all employ collaged elements from nature. Yet, make no mistake. These artworks are fully realized paintings with the rare power to draw in the viewer’s attention, and then to hold it almost endlessly. The artist seems to want to remind viewers that while there is no escaping the natural cycle of life and death, beauty is there every step of the way for those who would gather it in with their eyes.

The quality of Swartz’s relentless passion is ever-present in this powerful exhibit of work by an accomplished and much-lauded painter. Swartz’s work has been displayed in museums around the world. Renewal is a chance to enjoy a museum-quality examination of this important artist’s work without an admission fee.

Susan Swartz renewal through November 24, Georges Bergès Gallery, 462 West Broadway

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