With metal scraps and the eye of a perfectionist, Polish born creator Stanley Szwarc crafted thousands of intricately embellished objects, no two ever alike
Stanley Szwarc created boxes, vases, crosses and other objects from cast-off stainless steel, decorating each with geometric accents of spotwelded quarter-inch dots, circles of bigger diameters, cylinders and squares, perforated strips, and a variety of other shapes. The intricate, layered ornamentation, born of his imagination, lends the items a sculptural quality and elevates them beyond their functional purpose.
Szwarc was prolific. From the late 1980s until his death in 2011 at the age of 82, he made thousands of pieces. He sold as much of them as the market would bear, never affiliating exclusively with a dealer, a practice that kept his art-world profile and his prices lower than they should have been. Affordable and beautiful, abundant and yet unique, his works can be found in homes all over Chicago.
box, c. 1992, stainless and plated steel, 10 x 9 x 3.5 in. / 25.5 x 23 x 9 cm
During his lifetime, Szwarc did get a modicum of recognition in art circles, for example when the Folk Art Society of America awarded him its annual Award of Distinction in 2005. His artwork was occasionally featured in group shows, while in 2007 he was in a two-person show at the Brickton Art Center in Park Ridge, Illinois, and in 2016 he was given a small solo show at Chicago’s Intuit Art Center (now Museum). For Szwarc though, his art-making was never about accolades – even if he was touched when he received them – it was more a matter of personal compulsion to create, and to create to his own high standards.
box,1989, 8.5 x 5 x 2.5 in. / 21.5 x 12.5 x 6.5 cm
When he saw three of his works in the 1996 show, “Outsider Art: A Survey of Chicago Collections” – held at the Chicago Cultural Center and sponsored by Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art – his reaction was not entirely favourable. One of the items, a jewellery box decorated with a human face, needed cleaning. Worse, the other two pieces – a small cross and a vase, both covered with the geometric patterns characteristic of Szwarc’s work, were early efforts that in his view were not up to his later standards. The artist was embarrassed by the two older works and wanted to give their lenders replacements that better reflected his current abilities. And he did.
cross, 2001, 4 x 8 .5 x 0.5 in. / 10 x 21.5 x 1.5 cm
The episode was typical of Szwarc. He was modest about his talent, despite the work’s enormous importance to him. “I have never considered myself an artist,” he said. “I'm just a clever handyman.” Collectors of his work would disagree. His creations – with their extravagances of ornamentation through which his imagination took flight – demonstrate exactly why he was an artist . As Szwarc layered smooth panels of metal with bits and pieces of spot-welded stainless steel, sculptural forms emerged. The geometric, intricate combinations can be evocative despite their formal abstraction.
In some instances, the patterns are figurative: faces, plant and animal forms, airplanes and buildings. The scale of the work ranges from earring-sized crosses to floor-standing vases. Along with the large vessels, tiny trinkets and fancy jewellery boxes, Szwarc created more utilitarian objects such as key fobs and mailboxes. He buffed most of his creations to a high sheen, and painted some with enamels after welding them together.
By WILLIAM SWISLOW
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #127.
