Curated by Rachael Teagle, Susan Swartz’s exhibition at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art explored a pivotal evolution in the artist’s practice, tracing her movement from representational landscape painting toward a deeply personal and expressive abstraction. Rooted in a lifelong engagement with nature and informed by both the traditions of American landscape painting and California abstraction, the exhibition highlighted Swartz’s ability to transform paint into emotionally charged “landscapes of the mind.” Through richly layered surfaces, gestural marks, and luminous fields of color, works from series including Nature Revisited and Breaking Away reflected themes of resilience, healing, and renewal, shaped in part by the artist’s recovery from a long battle with Lyme disease. The exhibition revealed Swartz’s process-driven approach, where memory, materiality, and the vitality of the natural world converge into paintings that are both intimate and expansive.
Breaking Away: Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis, Davis, CA
Past exhibition