Chapter NY is excited to announce see you in the funny papers, Emma Schwartz’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition will take place in the Side Room at 60 Walker Street and will include a selection of recent paintings.

Schwartz’s practice reflects upon experiences of introversion, revealing isolated figures and solitary structures through hazy and textured surfaces. Each painting is built up with many layers of material, including oil paint, pastel, charcoal, and graphite applied with rags, knives, and erasers. Schwartz redraws and repaints her compositions allowing them to unfold spontaneously, with their histories—sometimes visible, sometimes hidden—embedded within their accumulated layers. Forms and figures emerge not only from painted line, but from the crevices of her low relief surfaces.

Melancholic and spooky images suggest the beginnings of narrative threads that unfold loosely across each work. The compositions often posit metaphorical threshold, such as the transition to sleep, the loss of hair, exterior facades, and interior domestic spaces. At once specific and recognizable, but also vague and uncertain, Schwartz’s paintings navigate the thin membrane that separates the familiar from the unfamiliar.

The title of Schwartz’s exhibition—see you in the funny papers—is an idiom that refers to newspaper comic strips and is used as a facetious farewell suggesting that the person being addressed is laughable or odd. Conceived as a pleasantry with a cruel undertone, the idiom echoes an American proclivity for concealment.

Her paintings in the exhibition feature reoccurring subjects, including ranch homes based on buildings from the artist’s hometown in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee and female figures that vaguely evolve from the artist herself. The ghost-like dwellings serve as containers, or spaces of entrapment, with historically fraught architectures that emanate a disquieting energy. Conversely, her female figures bleed into their amorphous surroundings, loosening the boundaries between their conscious, preconscious, and subconscious selves. In still waters run deep, wasps—an unlikely good omen—swarm an inexplicable drain.

Emma Schwartz (b. 1992, Toronto, Canada) lives and works New York City. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2019. Schwartz has been included in recent group exhibitions at Circle Contemporary, Chicago, IL; FALSE FLAG, Queens, NY; Y2K, New York, NY; The Hole, New York, NY; and DUPLEX, New York, NY; among others. In 2019 she received the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Venice Award.