InLiquid is proud to present Philadelphia and Beyond: 30 years of Urban Redux, featuring artist member Charlotte Schatz. “Changing Philadelphia,” the title of InLiquid’s 3-part series, characterizes much of Schatz’s work of the last 30 years.

Her studios have been located in old industrial areas of Philadelphia, where she was surrounded by the powerful geometry and architecture of the vacant breweries, factories, hoppers and smokestacks of the vanishing industrial age. These buildings and others like them, which once provided a livelihood for the people of Philadelphia, are now vacant, disintegrating or being demolished. Schatz references the times when these structures were new and glorious, full of life and industry. She wants her paintings to provoke a reaction to the geometry of these beautiful empty buildings, sans people, in a seemingly unreal space full of subjective color.

Schatz uses color to locate and emphasize space and light in an expressionist manner with reference to the Precisionists, who depicted mechanical and industrial subject matter at the beginning of the Industrial age. This allows her to combine her aesthetic, social and formal concerns. While the paintings are not intended to be a historical record or an accurate depiction of architecture or perspective, there is a historic aspect to the work that has been described by Robin Rice as “…resurrected relics of power that have a new life in memory.”