NEW YORK, NY.- Nicola Vassell announced exclusive representation of painter Elizabeth Schwaiger, and her first solo exhibition at the gallery. Opening on January 11, 2024, Now & Now & Now, will include a new series of paintings offering expeditions into unpeopled spaces, unrestrained nature, and uncanny interiors. Schwaiger renders ethereal domains with dissonant materials; she applies watercolor, acrylic, ink, and oil to canvas in chromatically harmonious, but thinly veiled layers that bleed, permeate, and blur into overgrown, evanescent sceneries. Shaped by her personal experiences with childbirth and scuba diving—empirically disparate but sensorially analogous—Schwaiger’s life and practice are subsumed by forces greater than herself.
Elizabeth Schwaiger is a research-based artist living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BA from The University of North Texas and MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. In her decade-long exploration of power dynamics and the climate crises, Schwaiger has used variegated symbolism to depict water, fracturing, dimensional overlay and gesture, to construct images suggestive of the interplay among unseen forces that govern our world. She has exhibited in the UK, the USA and Seoul, Korea including shows at The Walker Gallery National Museum in Liverpool, The Macintosh Museum in Glasgow, The National Portrait Gallery in London, Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Glasgow International, Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh, Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, and Co-Lab Projects and GrayDUCK Gallery in Austin. Recent projects include a solo presentation at the Independent Art Fair with Nicola Vassell Gallery in NYC as well as a solo exhibition titled Pressing Shadows at Gana Art in Seoul, Korea. She was an artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida in 2019. Her work has been featured in Forbes, The Brooklyn Rail, The Catlin Guide, fields magazine, Floorr, Fusebox Written & Spoken, Newfound, Conflict of Interest, Sightlines, and The Austin Chronicle. Schwaiger is represented by Nicola Vassell in New York.
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
–Excerpt from “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich
Nicola Vassell is a contemporary art gallery committed to discourse that widens the lens of the history and future of art. Its focus is on developing an inter-generational, cross-disciplinary program of international artists and thinkers.
