Karen Schwartz’s paintings are composed in a state of disorder — not as chaos, but as aftermath. They are what remains after origin becomes unclear, after myth collapses into feeling, after legacy dissolves into personal rupture. Across abstraction, collage, and gestural mark-making, Schwartz rearranges fragments into new visual systems — a search not for resolution, but for survival.
Her recent work, created during a period of profound personal loss — first the death of Schwartz’s mother, then, years later, her father — carries the emotional weight of that sequence. Entropy becomes both subject and method. The world, and the self within it, has come undone. The act of making becomes a way to reassemble meaning from what is left behind.
In Schwartz's practice, painterly inheritance — the visual language passed down from canonical male lineages — is both cited and subverted. Through collage, torn paper, and loose canvas, the artist refuses the rigidity of tradition in favor of something fugitive and felt.
Karen Schwartz is an Atlanta-based artist working primarily in painting and drawing in a range of media. She has had solo exhibitions in Atlanta and New York and has shown work in group shows in the US and abroad. Her work is currently being represented by Jennifer Balcos Gallery in Atlanta. Prior exhibition history includes solo and group shows at Hathaway Contemporary in Atlanta, as well as Life on Mars and David & Schweitzer in Brooklyn. Schwartz's 2015 solo exhibition at Life on Mars Gallery in Brooklyn was reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, Tilted Arc, Painter’s Table and The Huffington Post. She also has works in private and corporate collections, and her portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt was acquired by The New-York Historical Society for the launch of the institution’s new Women in History Center. A practicing clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, Schwartz finds that these pursuits inform her artwork in fascinating, sometimes subconscious ways, and that her creative processes offer curious insights into her work in psychotherapy.