RICHMOND, VA.- Page Bond Gallery opened Peri Schwartz’s seventh solo exhibition at gallery. Schwartz’s trademark tessellations of her studio environment offer a meditative entry into an everyday setting. Her oeuvre can be seen as an extended exercise that reveals a boundless reserve of compositions, colors and surfaces. These works invite viewers to enter into a compositional puzzle of sorts, as each form’s history is visible in the traces of grid lines, or the ghosts of objects Schwartz has decided to obscure or remove. These paintings or “vignettes” of quotidian life experience prize the simple elegance of forms, color, and the extraordinary capabilities of negative space.




In the 2013 video publication, A Look Into Peri Schwartz’s Studio, Schwartz describes her process as a highly organized, almost obsessive gridded arrangement of objects, colors and shapes in an expanded still-life setting. Sizing up the room with the straight edge of a ruler, she physically marks her surroundings (books, table, walls, etc.) with grid lines that materialize on canvas in the form of complex point of view studies. Her stylistic decisions range from exacting and decisive, to impulsive and painterly—resulting in works that sit on the edge between abstraction and reality.

Peri Schwartz received her BFA from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts, and earned an MFA from Queens College. Her paintings, prints and drawings focus on composition and the interplay of color, light and space. Selected collections of note include the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, France; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Schwartz currently lives and works in New Rochelle, NY.