A letter from the curator:

I think about corners a lot.

Not so much the way they point outward, such as elbows, but how they direct our attention inward the way a rib cage does. Despite outward appearances, corners actually point into themselves, towards their contents. Within the parameters that corners create, rests something specific and singular. It’s an object, a place, a plane. The location of corners determines how far apart the edges–—the borderline—of that something will be.

As someone who makes paintings, I specifically think about the way corners divide and determine the planes we call paintings and the walls that those paintings hang on. Every now and again I come across a painting that I deem a 'corner painting'. That is to say, a painting which very specifically directs our attention to its own corners.

When I saw Andrew Schwartz’s painting, Pastoral, on Instagram in early 2023, I said to myself, “Gosh damn, that is a textbook ‘corner painting'." The painting’s compositional makeup sweeps us gracefully from the middle of the piece out toward the corners. Each