About the Artist

Karen Schwartz is an Atlanta and New York City-based artist working primarily in painting and drawing in a range of media. Karen began her 30-year career as a mostly self-taught artist creating portraits and human figures by whatever means possible and available to make marks.

Process-driven, she has an appetite to explore the properties and interactions of materials not necessarily meant to be used together. Schwartz sees making paintings as a way to find meaning in the piling up of images without regard for hierarchy, a means to make unformulated experience real and concrete through visual form.

She enjoys the physical and nonverbal experience of making visual art, so different from the highly verbal and relatively sedentary practice of her other practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Currently, Schwartz is represented by the Jennifer Balcos Gallery in Palm Beach and Atlanta. Previously, Schwartz was a featured artist at the Hathaway Contemporary and The Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta. Her work, twice curated into the Red Clay Survey Exhibition of Southern Contemporary Art at the Huntsville Museum, earned a merit award in 2017.

In Brooklyn, NY, Schwartz's solo exhibitions have been at Life on Mars Gallery (reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, Tilted Arc, The Huffington Post, and Painter’s Table) and at David & Schweitzer Contemporary. Schwartz has shown work in solo and group shows around the US and abroad. Her work resides in private and public collections, including an acquisition by the New York Historical Society for the launch of their Women in History Center.

A practicing clinical psychologist, Schwartz finds that her clinical psychoanalytic practice informs her artwork in fascinating, sometimes less than conscious ways, as her studio practice offers curious insights into her work as psychotherapist. Both support her faith in free association and unconscious meanderings to get at unanticipated meanings.