Charlotte Schulz

Charlotte Schulz (born 1960) is an American visual artist best known for intricate charcoal drawings, sometimes composed of multiple sheets that she tears, folds and distresses in order to disrupt the two-dimensional picture plane. Her work explores personal and collective responses to traumatic, often-public, experiences and events, interweaving vignettes of landscape, interiors, disasters and unexpected elements in dreamlike combinations that upend spatial and temporal conventions. Artillery critic Seph Rodney describes her drawings as works of "elegant and surreal lyricism" that are exquisitely rendered, thick with detail, and perplexing in their mix of fractured visual logic, overlapping realities, and speculative ruminations on space and time. Charlotte Schulz, Suspended in the Midst of a Flood the Past Carries Itself into a Current Location and Pressures a Rescue from Geographical Forces, charcoal on paper, 34" x 40" x 4", 2010.

Schulz has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Mills College Art Museum, and been featured in group shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and Dorsky Gallery, among others. Schulz lives and works in Peekskill, New York and teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City. After studying art at Kent State University, she and her family moved to Florida, where she worked with painter Mernet Larsen and earned a BA degree at University of South Florida (1983). the Ringling show, curated by former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler, led to the museum's purchase of her painting, Room of My Own (1992).

In 1999, Schulz moved to Brooklyn. She was awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Her subsequent solo exhibitions have been held at Smack Mellon and Wake Forest University (2010) and Beacon Project Space (2015). She draws on personal history, art and poetry, news events and collective experiences for imagery; her early work was more personally focused, while since the mid-2000s, she has linked the personal with public and geopolitical issues such as the nature of violence and hatred, tragedy, terrorism and war, and the environment. She relinquished the need to start with a structuring house image, instead taking an approach that upended seemingly fixed, opposed constructs like inside and outside, influenced by the fluid, non-Cartesian conception of space and events posited in Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.

Charlotte Schulz, Traversing an Open Interior, charcoal and pastel on paper, 47" x 39" x 1", 2017–8. Schulz's surfaces function like screens onto which she projects and layers beliefs, emotions, and potential realities or parallel worlds to form purposefully disjointed narratives that suggest a contemporary psychological index; Its sheets are arranged on the wall like dominoes (or story panels) and depict incongruous imagery: an airplane flying through a room, everyday domestic elements, explosions, scenes of passage and escape, a sheep on a platform. These individual and multi-sheet drawings feature abandoned landscapes shot through with billowing darkness and light, dislocated interiors, and unexpected juxtapositions of size (tiny figures, vast spaces), non-sequiturs, symbols and collective memory (e.g., Suspended in the Midst of a Flood the Past Carries Itself into a Current Location and Pressures a Rescue from Geographical Forces, 2010). Reviews characterize this work as pristine and unsettling, photographically precise, Works such as An Early Map with No One to Say When the Ocean Begins or Traversing an Open Interior (both 2017) feature archaeological, geological and life forms seen from above suggesting timeless societal, environmental and internal processes taking place in a divided world.

Awards and public collections Schulz has been recognized with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2010), Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (2002),