Ludwig Schwarz, 1984 - 2016, USA, 90min

Ludwig Schwarz is a performance artist, performing the role dutifully day in and day out. For many years, Schwarz has maintained a studio practice

relentlessly pursuing the poetic testament of his personal life, cultural observations, institutional critique, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Cowboys, and perfecting a brisket recipe, each of which and more have been subjects of his work. Many artists have practices described as, “the intersection of” two disciplines or preoccupations. Ludwig Schwarz’s work is a universe worth of intersections, all with variable dimensions. Such is the Schwarzian narrative; reliably truth telling while performing in the spectacle and theater of art.

Working with sculpture, painting, video, sound and installation, Schwarz deftly manages to inject each with bravado and restraint. For Schwarz, “the object isn’t an endgame, it’s a conceptual link and a marker of time, always in play and stage ready.”

Schwarz's situationally narrative sculptures, paintings and installations operate by unapologetically asking the viewer to consider not only the mostly incongruous collection of objects they are looking at, but where they are located, their circumstance (often tragi-comic) and the sorted, messy, and often absurd relationship between the two. As Bill Davenport noted in the 2014 Glasstire review of Schwarz’s Retrospective, “each new work is another instance of Schwarz applying Schwarz, like barbecue sauce, to new situations.”