Art Fair Week at Kelley Roy Gallery
Nov. 30 Sunday – Dec. 7 Sunday
Kelley Roy Gallery
Wynwood Arts District
153 NW 24 Street
Miami, FL 33127
RSVP at info@kelleyroygallery.com
Join Us For Art Fair Week
Pre-Art Basel Events
Nov. 30 Sunday, Brunch 10am-2pm (Please RSVP info@kelleyroygallery.com)
Dec. 1 Monday, Works by Peri Schwartz 5pm – 9pm
Extended Gallery Hours:
Dec. 2-3 Tuesday-Wednesday, 10am-8pm
Dec. 4 Thursday, 10am-6pm
Dec. 5-6 Friday-Saturday, 10am-8pm
Dec. 7 Sunday, 10am-6pm
Peri Schwartz is included in collections internationally, among them the British Museum, London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., and the Kupferstichkabinett-Staatliche Museum, Berlin. Working with different media is an important part of the process Schwartz uses to develop her works. Representing similar subjects and formal arrangements in a variety of media challenges her to rethink and revise her compositions. The initial works done in her Studio series were created using charcoal; this allowed her to easily rework their compositions. Schwartz then alternated between creating paintings, drawings, and mono-types of the same subject; this method of moving back and forth between different media further facilitates the process she uses to work out formal arrangements.
Schwartz also addresses pictorial challenges in her Bottle &Jars series. In the carefully composed but compressed space of these works, attention is drawn to how the bottles and jars fill the picture plane and how they relate to each other and the space around them. In the way this is done, it is clear color and shapes are as much the subject of these works as are the bottles and jars themselves. The effect is that these works must be understood as a modern synthesis of representation and abstraction.
The Wrapped Objects were first exhibited at the Fine Arts Center Galleries at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. They are included in the collections of the Library of Congress, Fogg Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery and Memorial Art Gallery. In the catalog for the exhibition, Judith Tolnick Champa describes the work: In her idiosyncratic pastel drawings known as Wrapped Objects – Schwartz’s demonstrated expertise in figural art is brought to bear on a powerful sense of the self-containment associated with still-life, rather than figural practice. The Wrapped Objects ultimately derive from a campaign of intensive study of anatomy and its intimate historical correlative, drapery’s connection to the human body. The dazzling drapery interpretations of legendary figurative painters including the 16th-century Venetian, Titian; the 17th-century Spaniard, Diego Velazquez, the Fleming, Anthony Van Dyck and the 19th-century French artist Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, offers models of an art historical sort cited by the artist as the first Wrapped Objects were created and conjured by her work. Schwartz understands the accomplished pictorial means which these exemplars developed for interpreting their complex royal/aristocratic subjects. The subject is present beneath the drapery, but its individual shape and character – clues to its identity – are conveyed only through the push and pull, the tightness or laxness, the intricate surface wrap. And in the process the surface wrap gains its own freestanding vitality and identity.
Understanding shifts as Schwartz’s mysterious subjects become curious Wrapped Objects and figuration melds into a re-emergent sensation of still life. Exactly what is being represented is of less importance than how pictorial effects are achieved. Technically, Schwartz works in pastel but without the assistance of a coarse granular paper. She chooses a more finely grained and technically unforgiving surface, so that textures must be constructed through precise calibration of light and dark tonalities. Her pastels behave almost like charcoals as the richness of blue-blacks contrasts with the smooth matrix of white paper.
Peri Schwartz Exhibit through January 9, 2015
