Peri Schwartz: Color and Process

On View: September 4 – 29 2018
Reception: Friday, September 7, 6-8 pm

Peri Schwartz uses her studio as her subject matter. In the studio, she creates stage sets using books, bottles, and the architecture of the space. She is constantly arranging, re-arranging, adding, and subtracting from her still life throughout each painting. In the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, Lauren P. Della Monica, curator, writes about Schwartz’s compositions. “In some of the work, the bottles and jars are the subject, their blocks of color creating the composition. In the Studio paintings, they provide a sense of scale within the larger room, defining the center of the canvas. Often the bottles and jars are merely suggested—objects in space with their ghostly details intentionally left undone, having been moved again and again.

Jars IIA

2016, watercolor on paper, 15×22”

Studio XLIX

2018, oil on canvas, 44×48”

Jars IV

2016, watercolor on paper, 15×22”

Studio XLIII

2016, oil on canvas, 46×38”

Studio XLVI

2017, oil on canvas, 48×44”

Studio XLV

2017, oil on canvas, 48×38”

Studio L

2018, oil on canvas, 38×42”
SOLD

Jars I

2017, spite bite aquatint with drypoint and sugar lift (edition of 25), 15×22”

Studio #17

2018, monotype, 25×29.5”

Peri Schwartz

Peri Schwartz (born 1951) passed away in 2021 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Schwartz was born and based in New York, began her studies at Boston University’s School of Fine Arts, and continued on to Queens College to receive her Masters of Fine Arts.

Realism and abstraction come together in her pieces as she worked directly with her subjects depicting them with deliberate linear strokes. The contained settings of her, “Studio Interiors,” engage the viewers with dynamic, flattened compositions. The studio paintings reflect Schwartz’s long history of using her space as her subject matter. In the studio, where she created stage sets using books, bottles, and the architecture of the space, she was constantly arranging, re-arranging, adding, and subtracting objects in each painting. Schwartz played with the scale of her space using bottles and jars set against the backdrop of large blocks of color, which was then set against a window to the exterior of her studio in New Rochelle, NY. In paintings, prints and drawings, Schwartz explained that she focused on composition and the interplay of color, light and space.