Sylvia Schwenk’s pandemic-era project—an ensemble of paintings on paper titled “your thoughts become your world”—begins with multiplicity. As soon as you have seen just a few, you cannot help but notice relationships between them, even as each one remains distinct. And as you see more of them, you know that there must be even more to see, as more relationships and more distinctions come into play. And yet the unfolding of these resemblances and singularities never seems random or infinite. To get our bearings amidst this evolving multiplicity—spanning more than 280 paintings so far—it may be useful to distinguish between three levels of composition.

1. The project as a whole encompasses four series of paintings that Schwenk calls “seasons.” Every painting in a season uses the same palette of three colors (although some use only one or two of them). The colors, applied in either watercolor or acrylic paint, manifest varying qualities of solidity, contrast, and coherence. Across all of these permutations, the palette acquires both formal versatility and expressive range.

2. The works of each season are presented in small sets (between two and five paintings) that Schwenk calls “weeks”. Arranging the paintings by week allows them to form discrete units that might resemble sequences, diagrams, or constellations. Every week puts together paintings that seem to go together, or not; either way, it becomes clear that none of them should be seen in isolation and that they all have something in common.

3. Throughout the project Schwenk develops a tight repertoire of abstract shapes or configurations. The shapes are immediately easy to grasp, and it is tempting to give them names as if they are trying to be representations of something. And yet what looks like a figure in one place becomes a background somewhere else; pictorial conventions lose their privilege. By subtle degrees, weightiness drifts and settles, nearness comes and goes. Even the monochrome fields are shaped by inner contours. But as you see more iterations of each shape in the various colors, sometimes flipped over or turned around, their precise specificities reassert themselves: they are their own kinds of things.

Using these apparently simple variables, Schwenk generates an enormous array of possibilities in composition and presentation. But the effort to summarize the project this way—extracting a logic of series, sets, and shapes where every trait would fall into place—makes the work sound more fixed and final that it is.

.

Sylvia Schwenk was born in Mannheim, grew up in Australia and now lives in Berlin. She is a multidisciplinary artist who uncovers relationships between the body and the everyday.

For Schwenk, art is about possibilities. Her works have a sense of play and accessibility that engenders a different way of looking at things. Schwenk shows us worlds we want to live in. She also presents the everyday with new perspectives for us to experience and consider. Sometimes Schwenk creates works of socially engaged performance art with tens or hundreds of people that emphasize collaboration, fun, dialogue and audience activation. She works closely with communities to explore local issues, creating artworks that are both context-responsive and universal in their presentation. Other times she captures moments, spaces or actions with paintings, films, drawings, sculptures or by writing a book. Whatever the medium, themes of community and communication run through her works, which unite art and social considerations.

Schwenk’s art addresses the need for equality and compassion in our social lives. Her projects translate her abiding concerns into artworks where viewers are invited to experience, in both emotional and conceptual ways, what it means to seek real change in themselves and in their communities. Her works encourage a dynamic awareness of what it means to pursue mutual recognition and ongoing transformation. Schwenk’s artistic practice is marked by care, generosity, and resolve. Her work offers pleasures and intrigues of its own, even while it opens up a common ground where we can envision new possibilities.

Schwenk performs and exhibits in art galleries, film festivals and communal spaces internationally.