Charlotte Schulz (b. Massillon, Ohio) studied art at Kent State University, Ohio and the University of South Florida, Tampa (MFA). She is the recipient of individual artist fellowships from the Gottlieb Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the State of Florida, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Her solo exhibitions include A Constellation of Small Events at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ; The Uneven Intensities of Duration at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; An Insufficiency in Our Screens at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut and Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California. Schulz’s work is included in the permanent collections of Mills College Art Museum, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the University of South Florida.
Schulz’s early paintings explore past memories and charged emotions utilizing a recurring image of a house as a metaphor for the psyche and placed within suburban landscapes. During the late 1990’s, she focused on drawings made in charcoal informed by images from poetry and art history. In these drawings, a fluid sense of space emerged in which both inside and outside weave together to depict a world infused with mystery and portent.
Schulz continues to work primarily in charcoal, and since 2005 has turned from flat, single-image drawings to composing with multiple sheets of paper that shape and disrupt the picture plane by tearing, folding, bending, and distressing the paper. With this, her formal concerns have concentrated on exploring the tensions between real space and illusionist space and on the sculptural potential of paper.
Currently, Schulz composes her drawings with multiple torn papers deftly organized in and around the drawn areas. Breaking from the rectangle, these images evolve into object-like configurations to convey the physical, dynamic forces at play within the allegories she depicts. Reading is an important part of Schulz’s artistic process as a way of both generating images and collaborating with the history of ideas and stories from the past.
Schulz maintains studios in Philadelphia and the Hudson Valley.