Publications
Susan’s latest solo exhibition opened in Berlin in September 2021. “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.” — Silke Hohmann, Curator
The catalog includes images of the 90 paintings included in the exhibition, as well as text in English and German by Jurgen Grossman, Silke Hohmann, Dieter Ronte, and Alexander Borovsky.
Susan described her 2018 Personal Path exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing, China as one of the major highlights of her career. Curated by Walter Smerling, the exhibition featured 83 works on canvas.
“Personal Path… focused on a decade of her lush, painterly abstractions. Swartz revels in paint the way a child might, digging into its gloopy, earthy materiality. It is the medium that most directly captures and conveys her vision as it has shifted over the years, from the mimetic to the more abstract and expressive in her recent paintings.” — Lilly Wei, Critic & Curator.
The catalog includes images of the 83 striking painting as well as a forward by Fan Di’an, President of CAFA.
Susan Swartz’s 2017 Personal Path exhibition included over 100 original works on canvas created over the last decade.
“Swartz is well versed in the culture of abstract art....Her work reflects the critical demands but she never lets any paradigm dominate her. Swartz approaches a paradigm, but then takes a step sideways. There she finds no trodden path; she happily takes risks to find her own way.” — Alexander Borovsky, Russian Art Critic & Curator of Contemporary Art at the Russian State Museum.
Available in English and Russian.
Following the resounding success of Susan Swartz’s exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, the work relocated to a partner museum in Budapest. Curated by Prof. Dieter Ronte in 2016, this exhibition chronicled the artist's personal development.
“Personal Path is an exploration of my journey as an artist. Originally I was a realist painter, and my work has since evolved to abstract acrylic paintings, going through a representational phase that primarily focused on depicting the aspen trees of Utah . In its third iteration, Personal Path at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest focuses primarily on my most recent acrylic works. However, pieces from the representational phase are also exhibited.”
Available in English and Hungarian.
The second iteration of Susan Swartz’ highly acclaimed Personal Path exhibition series was presented at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany in 2015. 80 paintings were exhibited across the three floors of the museum.
Professor Dr. Dieter Ronte, the curator of the exhibition, and former Director of the Museum of Modern Art Vienna and the Kunst Museum Bonn, described Swartz’s works as, “witnesses of personal introspection as self-discovery and self-determination through pictorial bursts […] full of romanticism, aspiration, love and always on the search for the secret supernatural, pursuing people’s mind towards nature, looking for a universal poetry which binds at the same time scholarship, religion and visual arts.”
A comprehensive collection of the most representative works of Susan Swartz, Natural Revelations was published in 2008 and went on to win the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for best regional non-fiction book. The annual competition drew 3,000 entries with over 600 in the regional category.
Paired with select poems or relevant quotes from renowned writers, Swartz's evocative landscape paintings bring to life the weighty silence and charged beauty of the natural world. The 106-page, four-color book opens with an essay from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr. Robert Coles and concludes with an essay from famed naturalist, Dr. Jane Goodall. Sandwiched between these lofty writings is an unwritten plea–one implored through fervent brushstrokes and impassioned swipes of the palette knife–to preserve the world's divine wildness for our children and grandchildren.
Called "a prayer for future generations", Natural Revelations is an enduring work of some of Swartz's most iconic paintings.
Painters of the Wasatch Mountains
Internationally known for her mountain renditions, Swartz's work is included in the 2005 collectors book, Painters of the Wasatch Mountains, published by Gibbs Smith and written by Robert S. Olpin, Ann W. Orton and Thomas F. Rugh. Writes Rugh, who is also the founding director of the Museum of Utah Art & History,
“The richness of [Swartz's] canvases reflects the lure of the American West-the yearning to follow paths that will lead to discovery and enlightenment. The beauty and density of her wooded landscapes are a universal symbol of the journey to a better world.”
Watch Thomas F. Rugh talk about how the book came to be ›
A distinct painting development focused on the American West's Wasatch Range emerged in the nineteenth century and persists today. Painters of the Wasatch Mountains presents for the first time a comprehensive survey of the gamut of painters who formed and have carried forward an expression of nature's mighty gift to visitors and residents of Utah. Grouped much like the Hudson River School in the East, the Wasatch School of artists includes painters Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, H.L.A. Culmer, Maynard Dixon and of course, Susan Swartz, whom the book's authors call "a significant contemporary American landscape painter."