‘On either side of this plane, foreground and background can be read as distinct planes of reality; these could in turn be defined as the actual and the virtual, or, perhaps, the real and the imagined or remembered. Narratives are therefore suggested as much by formal properties as by pictorial description; the self takes a back seat to the world of activity, or stares dreamily through glass into a dreamlike world outside.’
P. Price, in Galerie Max Hetzler Press Release, 2025, n.p.
‘I wanted to leave some ambiguity in terms of where the light is coming from and whether the spectral figure that's above is emitting a light or receiving the glow from the book.’
E. Swordy, in conversation on the occasion of the exhibition 'Say Less' at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2025
‘I tend to omit the figure overall and reduce the compositional structure to the head and a pair of hands and then whatever object they’re attending to.’
E. Swordy, in conversation on the occasion of the exhibition 'Say Less' at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2025
‘For this body of work, I decided to start integrating a stage after the coloured drawings where I’d make watercolours, specifically because I wanted to try to push the overall tonal structure of the paintings to feel more unified.’
E. Swordy, in conversation on the occasion of the exhibition 'Say Less' at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2025
‘Swordy’s confident brushwork offers resolution, while each work’s mise-en-scène tells another, more complicated story. In each painted tableau a figure interacts with its environment, or with another figure, by way of a gesture. In every case this gesture is mediated, either literally or symbolically, by an intervening object or tool.’
P. Price, ‘Busy Signal’ [Press Release], Galerie Max Hetzler, London, 2023
‘I have an approach where I think of each painting as having the same compositional requirements as a song, so that it has to have its own balanced type of internal rhythm. I like to give the figures these broad smoothly blended areas of colour and then punctuate it with all these small things. […] In my mind, the eye moves very quickly across the broad colour and then a bit more slowly across the more detailed areas. So in that way, as the eye circulates around the painting, you’re getting that rhythm.’
E. Swordy in conversation with J. Kothe, ‘Interview: Eleanor Swordy’, published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘BodyLand’, curated by Lauren Taschen at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 3 November 2022
All works: © Eleanor Swordy. Photo credit, unless specified: Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles
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