William Schwedler, Surrealist Architectural Landscape “Fall for it” 1970s Chicago Modernist, 1978

This serigraph has never been framed.

Chicago born Modernist. Showed at Andrew Crispo Gallery and Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Schwedler could not help but be influenced by the local artistic milieu particularly with those contemporaries and friends who formed the Hairy Who in the Mid – 1960’s
Schwedler’s Paintings from the beginning to his young end were ripe with a surreal, abstract poetry filled with references to landscapes, architecture, texture (cracked), line (broken,chopped, and Pulled to pieces), and delicate, but voluptuous color. Studying at the Art institute of Chicago with his friends Cynthia Carlson, Jim Nutt, Art Green, and Karl Wirsum, taking in the grains, textures, spaces, and elevated structures of this oh-so-American city.
part of an artistic circle that included Italo Scanga, Ernest Silva, Lee Jaffe, and Donald Gill. Franz Schulze (Chicago Imagist Art, 1972 ) has observed of Schwedler, “… his work took on its fundamental character during his chicago years. if the city did not form him it was surely the place where his formative experiences occurred …”.
Befitting an artist born and trained in Chicago, Schwedler was much affected by funk and given to jokey titles and weird imagery, but his colors, which seem as if they are veiled by fine black gauze, don’t fit with the jokes. He worked mainly geometrically, alluding to figures occasionally in paint and collage, and he sometimes accentuated shapes by building them up in Rhoplex. Toward the end, he was painting on undulating bands of plywood mounted to stand a couple of feet off the wall. This is Surrealism that projects a very unhumorous sense of matter decomposing, in the Ivan Albright tradition. He showed in 1974 at the inaugural show of Alessandra Gallery with Curt Barnes, Charles Garabedian, Art Green, Michael Hurson, Jane Kaufman, Italo Scanga and Wm. Schwedler