‘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
‘During the lockdown all of the road workers halted. So after they were allowed to get back to work in New York, it was almost like an explosion of roadwork, where you felt that the city was regurgitating itself everywhere you went. To me it feels so painterly anyway to see construction workers rebuilding the streets. I wanted a painting that gave that effect of turning back in on itself and painting itself. […] For this painting, because I put the horizon line on the vertical axis rather than horizontal, I thought that the world could be like a cylinder where it gets more expanded to the centre and tapers towards the side. So I like the idea that the figures are surrounding you and disappearing and that there’s an implication of a whole space behind it that you can’t see.’
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
‘When thinking of Swordy’s work, one is envisioning rich textures, vibrant color choices, and rich compositions suggesting elaborate, borderline fantastical narratives. As a master of composing the right amount of exciting elements to create impactful and intriguing visuals, both in a technical and contextual sense, it’s so great to see the artist using her strong point when working with a completely different technique.’
E. Swordy in conversation with S. Bogojev, ‘Eleanor Swordy's Pastel Drawings @ Tennis Elbow in NYC’, in Juxtapoz, 14 April 2021
‘With drawing, I see an opportunity to approach the work with an attitude of decisiveness and clarity that is often elusive in painting. Drawing feels particularly conducive to accruing visual information and being compositionally inventive while working on a shorter timescale.’
E. Swordy in conversation with S. Bogojev, ‘Eleanor Swordy's Pastel Drawings @ Tennis Elbow in NYC’, in Juxtapoz, 14 April 2021
‘The “figures" in the paintings are often not meant to be perceived as the primary subject of the work so nudging the horizon out of the composition directs focus back to the environment the figures occupy. I like utilizing this strategy to dispel emphasis on one particular part of the image, rather than hoping for every aspect of the painting to be taken as a whole.’
E. Swordy in conversation with S. Bogojev, ‘Eleanor Swordy's Pastel Drawings @ Tennis Elbow in NYC’, in Juxtapoz, 14 April 2021
‘I thought the subjects should feel analogous to the immediacy that making drawing delivers so I centered on quotidian vignettes […]. Whereas the figures in my paintings are often preoccupied and at a distance from the viewer, I hoped the subjects of these drawings could make themselves available by behaving in a way that felt recognizable and accessible.’
E. Swordy in conversation with S. Bogojev, ‘Eleanor Swordy's Pastel Drawings @ Tennis Elbow in NYC’, in Juxtapoz, 14 April 2021
‘Rendered meticulously, the images are filled with exquisite painterly sections where thick, bold gestures balance soft tones, solid, bold colors and, often, exacting patterns. The mix of grainy surfaces, silky gradients, and points of view, provide multiple moods and reactions, each contributing diverse layers of interpretation.’
E. Swordy in conversation with S. Bogojev, ‘Eleanor Swordy's Earth Signs @ Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles’, in Juxtapoz, 17 July 2020
‘In an era in which self-consciously quoting modernists is ubiquitous (so many homages to Gris, Mondrian, etc., often pleas for validation), Swordy quotes only to serve her own purposes – her fluency in art history is not equivalent to reverence. The obvious, iconic reference, Picasso, comes out in her characters’ rounded limbs, but she uses this early history of abstraction like a tool for making figuration more allegorical than literal. Dana Schutz, who also idiosyncratically stylizes her subjects in an immediately recognizable manner, comes to mind as a contemporary forerunner. In comparing Schutz and Swordy, it becomes clear, however, that Swordy belongs on the opposite side of the digital divide. Unlike so many so-called “internet artists,” she isn’t commenting on flatness or the confines of a screen, but the work is of its era, made by someone who surrounded by the language of Photoshop whether she sought it out or not.’
C. Wagley, ‘Eleanor Swordy at Moskowitz Bayse’, in Contemporary Art Review LA, 19 September 2018
‘Her images dramatize the conundrum of being both seer and seen, flickering between two or more perspectives. In this sense, they are quiet missives of empathy.’
S. Mizota, ‘Review: Eleanor Swordy’s paintings allegorize what it means to be a woman and an artist’, in Los Angeles Times, 16 October 2018
‘Eleanor Swordy’s […] rounded, abstracted figures do what women have done throughout art history – bathe, dress, sleep – but also engage in more generative activities: drawing, painting. Swordy’s women are remarkably self-possessed, both muses and artists. Rendered in smooth, full volumes that evoke the rounded, sculptural forms of Henry Moore, the women’s bodies also tweak the rules of perspective, existing in a flattened space that harks back to Cubism. A little Picasso shows up in For You, in which a woman puts on makeup before a mirror. Her reflection looks pointedly like one of the cockeyed faces in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (itself a hornet’s nest of sexual and cultural tourism). Although she makes up her own face, her reflection is distorted by the weight of history, with an emphasis on the “his”.’
S. Mizota, ‘Review: Eleanor Swordy’s paintings allegorize what it means to be a woman and an artist’, in Los Angeles Times, 16 October 2018
All works: © Eleanor Swordy. Photo credit, unless specified: Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles
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