The first exhibition of works by contemporary American artist Susan Swartz in Russia amasses around 100 paintings of various years from the collections of foreign museums, private collections, and the artist’s personal archive.

Susan Swartz’s abstract paintings evoke landscapes. The artist reflects on the history of the genre, continuing the traditions embraced by prominent German painters, Caspar David Friedrich and Gerhard Richter, as well as those based in American historical landscape painting of the second half of the 19th century, the Hudson River School and the Wasatch Mountains School.

Swartz seeks to recreate the state, the temperature of the landscape. She shares her desire to become part of the landscape, emotionally at least, with the viewer. What matters for her, though, are not textures or tree silhouettes, but the feeling of a mirage, the independent flow of color masses. Natural impressions are still there but they are hidden deeply in the color haze.

In Swartz’s oeuvre, the opposition between nature and art is resolved. Nature and the painter no longer represent a confrontation, but rather an evanescent harmony.