Andrew Schwartz’s practice explores the possibilities of abstract visual language using a vocabulary of color, form, light, and materiality. Collaborating with chance and the alchemical properties of paint, he employs a range of studio techniques in an improvisational flow of repetition and variation to create new visual outcomes.  Each painting becomes a site for impressions, residues, and subsequent excavations.

Schwartz’s recent work draws on the incidental beauty of daily visual experience, never discriminating between the monumental and the mundane. His paintings also allude to those microscopic and macroscopic abstract worlds brought into focus through the aid of technology. In an age flooded with ephemeral images all vying for attention, Schwartz is particularly interested in the role of painting as a format that demands patience and slow, intimate looking from its audience.

Andrew Schwartz received a BFA with concentrations in painting and sculpture from Cornell University in 2010 and an MFA in painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2016. Schwartz has exhibited his artwork at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC); Deanna Evans Projects (NYC); and Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA); among others. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

The books mentioned in the interview are: (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism).

Andrew Schwartz “Golem (Blue/Red)”, 2020, 30 x 22 inches, Oil, pigments, and mica on archival paper

Andrew Schwartz, “Late Bloomer”, 2019, 30 x 22 inches, Oil and pigments on archival paper

Andrew Schwartz “Impressions: Green-Wood”, 2020, 30 x 22 inches, Oil, pigments, and mica on archival paper