Charlotte Schulz (born 1960) is an American visual artist best known for intricate charcoal drawings, sometimes composed of multiple sheets that she tears, folds and distresses in order to disrupt the two-dimensional picture plane. Her work explores personal and collective responses to traumatic, often-public, experiences and events, interweaving vignettes of landscape, interiors, disasters and unexpected elements in dreamlike combinations that upend spatial and temporal conventions. Artillery critic Seph Rodney describes her drawings as works of "elegant and surreal lyricism" that are exquisitely rendered, thick with detail, and perplexing in their mix of fractured visual logic, overlapping realities, and speculative ruminations on space and time.
Schulz has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Mills College Art Museum, and been featured in group shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and Dorsky Gallery, among others. Schulz lives and works in Peekskill, New York and teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Early life and career
Schulz was born Charlotte Lentner in the small working-class city of Massillon, Ohio in 1960. After studying art at Kent State University, she and her family moved to Florida, where she worked with painter Mernet Larsen and earned a BA degree at University of South Florida (1983). She later studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1992) before returning to University of South Florida to complete an MFA degree in 1993.
After graduating, Schulz began to exhibit her paintings and drawings regionally, including shows at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Dunedin Fine Art Center, Society of the Four Arts, Tampa Museum of Art, and Lee Scarfone Gallery (solo); the Ringling show, curated by former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler, led to the museum's purchase of her painting, Room of My Own (1992).
In 1999, Schulz moved to Brooklyn. She was awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Her first solo museum show, "An Insufficiency in Our Screens" (2007), was held at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and traveled to the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland in 2008. Her subsequent solo exhibitions have been held at Smack Mellon and Wake Forest University (2010) and Beacon Project Space (2015). Schulz has taught at Parsons School of Design since 2000.
Work and reception
Schulz indicates that two foundational interests have structured her art: space and narrative. Influenced by philosophers exploring malleable conceptions of space and time, such as Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Elizabeth Grosz, her work conveys multiple, proliferating views and a cinema-like temporality. She draws on personal history, art and poetry, news events and collective experiences for imagery; her early work was more personally focused, while since the mid-2000s, she has linked the personal with public and geopolitical issues such as the nature of violence and hatred, tragedy, terrorism and war, and the environment. Schulz's drawings evolve intuitively, often beginning with ideas from reading, which she develops in sketchbooks before rendering small sections of an image at length, often without a predetermined plan. Her delicate charcoal drawing technique has been noted by New York Times critic Benjamin Genocchio, among others, for its close observation and painstaking detail, heightened level of finish, and control of the medium's capabilities.
Early paintings
Schulz's early oil paintings arose out of the dislocation she felt following her parents' divorce and move to the alien suburban sprawl and tropical life of Florida. These large works explore memories, charged emotions and relationship to place, using a recurrent, intimate metaphor of a house set in suburban landscapes to represent the human psyche. In an effort to break from a single perspective format, Schulz reshaped styles and spatial treatments of the past—drawing on sources from Cezanne, Cubism and Giorgio de Chirico to traditional Chinese landscape painting and the early Renaissance (e.g., Giotto)—to create personal, contemporary statements. They employ subtle shifts between maze-like interiors and suburban scenes to create fictionalized, cinema-like narratives, informed in part by her reading of Bachelard's phenomenological work The Poetics of Space.