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. And yet, even in the midst of unraveling, there’s a tender insistence — a belief that beauty and meaning can still be pieced together from what remains.

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.