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 and New York based artist working in painting and drawing in a range of media. She has had solo exhibitions in Atlanta and New York City, as well as participated in group showings in the US and abroad. She is a featured artist at Jennifer Balcos Gallery in Palm Beach and Atlanta. Prior exhibition history includes solo and group shows at Bill Lowe Gallery and Hathaway Contemporary in Atlanta and Life on Mars and David and Schweitzer in Brooklyn. Schwartz’s 2015 solo exhibition at Life on Mars in Brooklyn was reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, Tilted Arc, Painter’s Table, and The Huffington Post, 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 psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Schwartz finds that these pursuits inform her artwork in fascinating , surprising, and complicating ways. Equally, her creative process in the studio offers curious and self regulating insights into her work as psychotherapist.