Frank Schwaiger: Ritual Acts by Bruno David Gallery

FR A N K S C H WA I G E R Ritual Acts

bruno david gallery

FRANK SCHWAIGER Ritual Acts

October 17 - November 15, 2014 Bruno David Gallery 3721 Washington Boulevard Saint Louis, Missouri 63108, U.S.A. info@brunodavidgallery.com www.brunodavidgallery.com Director: Bruno L. David

Bruno David Projects 1245 S. Vandeventer Avenue Saint Louis, Missouri 63110, U.S.A. info@brunodavidprojects.com www.brunodavidprojects.com Director: Keri Robertson

This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition “ Frank Schwaiger: Ritual Acts” at Bruno David Gallery Editor: Bruno L. David Catalog Designer: Cleo Azariadis Design Assistant: Claudia R. David Printed in USA All works courtesy of Frank Schwaiger and Bruno David Gallery Photographs by Bruno David Gallery Cover image: Frank Schwaiger: Ritual Acts (Installation view) Copyright © 2014 Bruno David Gallery and Bruno David Projects All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of Bruno David Gallery and Bruno David Projects

CONTENTS

EYE SEARCH by Michael Lowenstein AFTERWORD by Bruno L. David CHECKLIST AND IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION BIOGRAPHY

EYE SEARCH by Michael Lowenstein

The hand guides the tool, chips the stone, and wields the brush. As the eyes search, forms emerge from the process, mysteriously. The hand evokes meanings-acts that define the artist and the man. A conduit is forged for the soul. The brain stumbles behind, laughing. --Frank Schwaiger

Art is created appearance. Like a meal, a novel, a well-designed interior, the art in this catalog invites you to participate, dig in, to notice and to wonder. My encounters with “Ritual Acts” have been rich and suggestive, engaging beyond paraphrase. I hope yours are as well. Frank’s versatility stands out immediately: the sculptures in bronze and stone, the work on the wall in a range of sizes and media, including oil and acrylics variously on canvas and fabric, panel, and over Shiko Munakata’s woodblock prints. The artist’s sure control shows as well in the pieces’ crisp intensity: the straight, black borders of the Homage to Munakata series, the solid black of the rocks in Stones, the figures in Running Man and Running Dog, the interstellar darkness in Eclipse/Moon. Frank’s skillful hand also shapes the scrupulously polished bronze surfaces of Echo, Selfie, and Lotus, the solidity of the sculptural forms in so many of the paintings, and the radiant hues: the greens, reds, oranges, and violets of the Munakata series, the mix of assertive colors in Running Man—violet, green, blue, and that strong vermilion in the center—the glowing orb and the rush of violet in Eclipse/Moon, the mysterious green of the face peering out in Look Homeward Angel. Then Frank’s work leads me in another direction. I notice its energy and movement, and they draw me in. The 24 Munakata acrylics, still so powerful, seize my attention again. This time, however, the motion of the pieces stands out. The geometric shapes in so many of them appear to bounce and move, as if we are looking through windows into small universes, watching their dynamic inner parts. Each piece, like a mandala, is worth regarding. Each engages and grounds me in the present. The sense of liveliness framed and contained is compelling. Eclipse/Moon conveys the same experience of vitality. Fragile trails of deep-space detritus streak comet-like through a quiet world and elicit my participation in the activity. I am almost moving along with it. Frank’s wit enlivens a number of the pieces: the slyly self-revealing, antique bronze version of Selfie, for example, with its spiky crown; the anatomical detail between the legs of the running man; and the painting of At the Lake on (beach?) towel. The humor encourages us to bring a part of ourselves to the work.

Frank skillfully uses open-ended narrative as well. We viewers are asked to help imagine and extend a story in progress. Two works capture faces at intensely ambiguous moments. The dark creature in Look Homeward Angel purses its lips and opens its eyes in the midst of an experience we are invited to contextualize: taking a homeward glance from afar. Echo may depict the nymph Echo herself, who ended up able to speak only what was said to her. Perhaps the striking expression on her face—is it awe? amazement? wonder?--asks us to imagine what she has seen and heard and what she is saying to us. Our awareness of a tale underway empowers both pieces. At the Lake also offers narrative elements that attract our participation. As I bask in the evocative summer colors, including the dark pine-tree triangles, I picture myself immersed in the slower, sunnier pace of beach life, lounging by a lake in a warm, pastoral world. The piece takes on an extra glow. Frank talks about his processes as an artist later at the gallery. He says the key is his search for what he calls “structure.” “I look for a structural system, a solid idea, then elaborate on it and decorate it, play with it.” Underneath the work is what he calls the “real structure”: “It’s the primary thing you have to find before you start playing with it.” That “underneath” exists literally in the Homage to Munakata acrylics that Frank created by painting over prints by the Japanese woodblock artist. “I set a problem for myself,” he says of the series: “See somebody else’s mind and structure and build a new structure on it.” Now That free-flowing process of entering the unknown and discovering possibilities as they arise teaches Frank as it unfolds. “I am playing with Munakata’s ideas,” as he puts it, “trying to find within his elaborate details a simple structure that has its own beauty.” Inspired by Munakata’s “rich heritage of folk art,” Frank ended up creating this set of what he calls “detailed tapestries” that reflect the folk art in his Bavarian background (as does the oil, Dawn). Once he found his structure, he says, the Munakata work just “flew out” of him in a week-long, “one-off binge. I couldn’t wait to do the next one.”

Frank’s four sculptures, all done originally in stone before three of them were cast in bronze, took months and sometimes years to complete. All four reflect Frank’s passion for stonework: “I am a stone carver,” he says. It’s “what I was put here to do.” He sees his work in the ancient tradition of sculpture created not as art but as “transmission objects” embodying the human desire to “reach and control the ‘beyond,’” the “impossible-to-understand.” Each of the four pieces emerges from the same free-flowing receptivity as the Munakata series--what Frank calls “the process of following where you and it will go.” “The stone is your teacher, “Frank says. You “wait for it to tell you what to do, which way to go,” especially in the beginning. Later you may “intellectualize” your learning, but you “shut your brain up at first.” So, too, in his paintings, which Frank says don’t start with thought-out ideas. He begins by “playing with a brush” until the “magical moment” when a pattern emerges, a ”fresh idea or interesting structure you can turn into an entity that becomes itself.” In Stones, for example, Frank began by playing with bigger and smaller circles of color, “building the painting’s intelligence as the process unfolds.” That open-minded readiness means that fortunate accidents can happen. Frank made Eclipse/Moon, for example, from a used drop cloth (the lower left semi-circle is the imprint of a paint can). “One day I found a pattern in it, trimmed and mounted it, began working with it—suddenly it emerged.” The antique version of Selfie is another example. Unground, unpolished bronze, its stabilizing wires left in, the sculpture turned out to be right just as it was--“a surprise that works.” Now closer to finding what Frank might call a structure for my experience, I visit the show once more. The work’s captivating blend of flow and finish, I conclude, reflects the freedom of Frank‘s methods as well as the sureness of his mastery. Both the playful energy of his discovering and the skill of his making suffuse the work in this lovely show. The Selfie twins tell it all: the one highly polished, intense, outgoing, the other a creature of accident and surprise--witty, mysterious, in process. Each seems the outcome of Frank’s “meanings-acts that define the artist and the man.” Michael Lowenstein is a Saint Louis-based writer and musician. This essay is one in a series of the gallery’s exhibitions written by fellow gallery artists and friends.

AFTERWORD by Bruno L. David 6

I am pleased to present a new exhibition titled “Ritual Acts” by Frank Schwaiger and, his second solo exhibition with the Bruno David Gallery. Ritual Acts is an exhibition including twenty-four works on paper as homage to twentieth century artist and printmaker Shiko Munakata, and features paintings and bronze sculptures. Schwaiger’s work has been widely exhibited. He is a graduate of the Washington University in St. Louis, School of Architecture (Now the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts), and received his Master from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he worked with Buckminster Fuller. He lives and work in St. Louis. Support for the creation of significant new works of art has been the core to the mission and program of the Bruno David Gallery since its founding in 2005. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Michael Lowenstein for his thoughtful essay. I am deeply grateful to Cleo Azariadis, who gave much time, talent, and expertise to the production of this catalogue. Invaluable gallery staff support for the exhibition was provided by Keri Robertson, Yoko Kiyoi, Cleo Azariadis, Yuwei Qiu, Ailing Zhang and Abigail Spratt.

CHECKLIST & IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION

Eclipse / Moon 2013 Acrylic on panel 66 x 49-1/2 inches (framed) (167.64 x 125.73 cm)

Running Man 2013 Acrylic on canvas 44 x 38 inches (framed) (111.76 x 96.52 cm)

Look Homeward Angel 2012 Acrylic on canvas and fabric 45-1/2 x 33-1/2 inches (framed) (115.57 x 85.09 cm)

Owl 2014 Limestone 14 x 8-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches Edition of 5 (35.56 x 21.59 x 21.59 cm)

Stones 2013 Acrylic on canvas 18 x 21 inches (framed) (45.72 x 53.34 cm)

Echo 2014 Bronze 43 x 15-1/2 x 4 inches Edition 2 of 5 (109.22 x 39.37 x 10.16 cm)

Running Dog 2013 Acrylic on canvas 34 x 40-1/4 inches (framed) (86.36 x 102.24 cm)

Selfie 2014 Bronze (Antique) 14-1/2 x 16 x 8-1/2 inches Edition of 5 (36.83 x 40.64 x 21.59 cm)

Selfie 2014 Bronze 14-1/2 x 16 x 8-1/2 inches Edition of 5 (36.83 x 40.64 x 21.59 cm)

At the Lake 2013 Acrylic on towel on board 19-1/2 x 29-1/2 inches (framed) (49.53 x 74.93 cm)

Dawn 2013 Oil on canvas 34 x 28 inches (framed) (86.36 x 71.12 cm)

Hommage to Munakata Series, 2014 Acrylic over Munakata woodblock prints 13-3/4 x 15-3/4 inches 21-1/8 x 22-5/8 inches (framed) (34.93 x 40.00 cm)

River of Time

Voices of the Spring Night

The End of it All

Spring Gate

Sage

Storm

Love

Winter Dreams of the Peony

Marigolds Rising Up

I Am

Fruit in a Garden

Peony Dreams

Kyoto

Eros

Rain on Pond

In the Beginning Was Light

Rites of Spring

Spring Goddess in the Night Sky

The End of Time

Evidence of Desire

Peony Ode / Miracle

Never the Desire

Whispers of Spring Quince

Stones in Water

ARTISTS Laura Beard Lisa K. Blatt Bunny Burson Carmon Colangelo Alex Couwenberg Jill Downen Yvette Drury Dubinsky Beverly Fishman Damon Freed Douglass Freed

Richard Hull Ellen Jantzen Michael Jantzen Kelley Johnson Howard Jones (Estate) Chris Kahler Bill Kohn (Estate) Leslie Laskey Peter Marcus Patricia Olynyk

Judy Pfaff Daniel Raedeke Tom Reed Frank Schwaiger Charles Schwall Christina Shmigel Thomas Sleet Shane Simmons Buzz Spector Cindy Tower

Joan Hall

Gary Passanise

Ken Worley

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