Phillip
Schwartz

Phillip Schwartz, Bio

Phillip Schwartz is from the metropolitan New York area. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, where he was awarded one of the prestigious travelling scholarships given to winners of the Fifth Year Competition along with a show at the Museum of Fine Art. He has shown at galleries in Boston, Provincetown and New York. Most recently he was included in a group show in Berlin, Germany at the Institut fur Alles Mogliche, which was unfortunately closed early due to the pandemic. He currently Lives in New York’s Hudson Valley where he continues to produce and exhibit his artwork. He has shown his work with groups of artists which promote social justice and HIV awareness in local, national and international venues. Much of his recent work is inspired by his family’s relationship to the Holocaust and his own inner journey in coming to terms with that history. Some of his work might be seen as questioning where G-d is in our struggle, while other pieces are visual laments or meditations. Some of his painting references Orthodox Christian Iconography and is executed using egg tempera with gilding on Gessoed wood. His paper cutouts and aluminum prints have a more contemporary feel and have been likened to serigraphs. The graphic nature of cut the paper differs so from the layered glazes of pigment and egg that the two bodies of work might appear to be from different periods of his career, but they complement one another as one process is slow and the other immediate. At the onset of the Covid Pandemic Phillip and his husband were in Berlin, Germany to attend the opening of a group show in which he had work included. The pandemic forced an early closure of the exhibition and an early return to the United States. Upon returning home Phillip began to sew masks for himself, his husband and friends and in doing that learned another medium which he has incorporated into his work extensively since 2020. He has been working on a body of work made up of quilts, some which follow his exploration of Holocaust themes and others are more autobiographical.