Darkening Warmth
Elizabeth Schwaiger

Check out the exhibition review from Sightlines.

Elizabeth Schwaiger’s research-based practice exists at the confluence of luxury and disaster. In Darkening Warmth, stand-ins for the accumulated worth of human existence — purpose-driven societies and summits, artwork in the studio or in a collection, focused laborers at their crafts, decadent interior trappings, and other more subtle depictions — all these are brought in Schwaiger’s paintings in raucous collision with their potential demise: flooding, decrepitude, overgrowth, and abandonment. Each of the artist’s works present our best attempts at permanence, at immortality, or even simple long lasting value, in stark contrast to cataclysmic and indifferent powers beyond anyone’s individual influence. Her work brings into appropriate scale our own strivings, and the looming ends to which they might succumb. They are a call to action to a great reprioritization of our aims as individuals and as a society with the chance yet of holding back the tide.

Elizabeth Schwaiger is an Austin Expat now based in Brooklyn. She earned her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2011. Recent projects include Expo Chicago and Untitled San Francisco with Jane Lombard Gallery; Kairos, a solo exhibition at Wild Project in Manhattan’s East Village; and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency Program at Rauschenberg’s studio complex in Captiva Florida. Her work and words have been featured in The Catlin Guide, fields magazine, Floorr, Fusebox Written & Spoken, Newfound, Conflict of Interest, Sightlines, The Austin Chronicle, and several other notable publications. Schwaiger is represented by Jane Lombard Gallery in Chelsea, NYC. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery will be on view this coming January.