FRANCESCA SCHWARTZ
Location:
New York City, NY, USA
ARTIST BIO
Francesca Schwartz is an artist and psychoanalyst based in New York. Her artwork is informed by a fascination with the materiality and metaphors of the female body. Schwartz works in a range of mixed media processes encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, and collage, and her diverse materials include paint, inks, dyes, wax, bone, textiles, and found objects. She has had solo exhibitions at Mu Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2022; M. David & Co. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2021; and Studio 1608, Miami, FL, 2018. Her recent group exhibits include Homage in Brooklyn, NY, 2024; Feminine Visions at Landmark Art Space in New York, NY; Lichtundfire Gallery, New York, NY, 2023; La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy, 2022; M. David & Co. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2022; Postcards from the Edge, New York, NY, 2019; and New York School of the Arts, New York, NY, 2018. Art fairs that have featured her work include Works on Paper, 2021; Market, Art and Design, 2021; and The Other Art Fair, 2021. Schwartz’s work has been featured in publications, including ROOM and Women United Art Magazine, and she has completed several residencies at M. David & Co. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artwork is an ongoing investigation of corporeality, femaleness, evolution and change, impermanence and disappearance. I explore these and related themes employing a range of media, using processes that relate to and reflect them.
Materiality is a core concern in my work, as I am endlessly fascinated by the composition of the body and its contents. The body is a home, and as a seat of memory, it is a consummate historian. We cannot know the body until we contemplate its disappearance. Probing these thoughts has led me to use processes including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, collage, assemblage, and installation, often in combinatory ways, and materials ranging from dyes, wax, bone, textiles, and found objects to a full array of painting and drawing media. I like some materials for their precision and others because of their elusiveness. Once in hand, alchemy takes over, and what happens is unexpected. So it goes as the unconscious emerges.
In an effort to embrace the language and inscriptions of the body, I echo these processes by tearing apart, unraveling, and desecrating. I merge and pin down disparate elements and materials that somehow need one another to function as composite wholes. Composition and installation allow for and accentuate these generative and regenerative modes of working. The results of my processes are generally abstract, but the implied presence of bodies, in whole or in part, is always apparent.
We begin and end in our bodies, our ancestral homes that bear the secrets and rhythms of our existence. My meditations on the body are expressions of the layered meanings of femaleness and of how the female body is a mystery of symbols and inscriptions. I am drawn to what is inside a woman, hoping to access a story, a history, and perhaps even a body held within.
