Painting by Ludwig Schwarz at Road Agent gallery, Dallas.
This is a tasty jpeg but the gallery's painting-triumphalist rhetoric is annoying. You can't brag that an artist's "past exhibitions have encompassed sculpture, video, installation, [and] conceptual performance" and that after being shortlisted for a prize for that work "he has focused primarily on painting" because "to become a great painter, one must dedicate oneself to the process." You just can't. The non-painting work is not there to provide cachet for an artist's sudden devotion to manual labor. Either he's always been serious or he hasn't. From what I know of Schwarz's work over the years painting has been one of a multiplicity of his activities, as it is for many artists. These myths of the dedicated painter have to be kept on life support for the sake of an intellectually retrograde, craft-driven market.