Self-portrait in Black Sweater II

New York artist Peri Schwartz was a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Self-portraiture was a central theme in her work. She took up the subject across media, usually working in a monochrome palette. In this body of work spanning some 30 years, she examined her face, her body—dressed and nude—her hands, her setting, her hair, her clothes, to distill the forms into a geometry of lines and shapes. Her works sit on the border between reality and abstraction. She approached her figurative work with the same spatial rigor that informed her still lifes and studio interiors, drawing from life, searching for shapes, lines, spatial interactions and harmonies to structure the composition and create an underlying logic in its appearance.