JULIA SCHWARTZ // Your Sap Runs Through Me

On view August 29–October 4, 2026
Opening reception Saturday, August 29 (2–4pm)

Nationale is pleased to welcome California-based painter Julia Schwartz on the occasion of her debut exhibition with the gallery. Your Sap Runs Through Me features a collection of paintings that pay homage to the artist’s reckoning with her creative practice after the passing of her daughter. This presentation will close an emotional, three-part series of recent exhibitions at Nationale each reflecting on loss, absence, and devotion.

In 2015, following two major personal losses, Schwartz radically altered her approach to art-making. She questioned: What does it look like to make sense out of senselessness? A move to Northern California mid-pandemic allowed for a home studio tucked between her home and an ever-evolving garden. As plants withered and died with the seasons, those changes became inextricably embedded into her work. Waves, crosses, dots, and arches define these paintings as symbols mimicking a varied psychological landscape. Are these paintings an experience, a feeling, a place, a memory, or all of the above? As in Untitled (Parts Not in the Right Places) the canvas is framed by a delicate blue arch of petals while the background quietly melts into an untamed field of dotted flora. This could be a scene one witnesses through a thicket, a tree, a window (a nod to another work in this collection) anywhere where new and old growth might appear to be dancing to the tune of the wind. Working on linen, the oil paints permeate the woven fibers in an almost ephemeral quality, the thatched substrate occasionally peeking through and offering a subtle, underlying texture to the soft strokes of the brush. In You Were Rainbow, You Were Yellow Light, You Were a Supernova the mark-making recalls serpentine paths or the scattering of seeds and blooms; the yellow sun in the right corner keeping a watchful eye, a gentle reminder of a new day. 

Taking the entirety of the gallery’s western wall, the piece Continuous Web is an on-going installation beginning in 2016 that repurposes the artist’s daughter’s Magic the Gathering cards as an act of devotion and care. Close to 2200 cards line the wall, painted by Schwartz with similar motifs and shapes as seen in the paintings that hang atop them. What is first experienced as an overwhelming expanse invites viewers to step closer. Love resolutely persists through grief and is elevated here to its highest purpose. Schwartz shares that, recently, she and her husband made a new area in their lower garden, filled it with yellow flowers, and scattered their daughter’s ashes. The garden and these intimate paintings are as much a keepsake as our memory. 

Julia Schwartz is a visual artist working in painting, installation, and paper. Deeply influenced by years of psychoanalytic study and practice, her paintings straddle figuration and abstraction. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including shows in LA, New York, London, Amsterdam, and Hudson. Schwartz’s curatorial projects include States of Being at the Torrance Art Museum (2015) and Black Mirror at Charlie James Gallery (2017). Her work has been featured in numerous publications including New American Paintings, Two Coats of Paint, Post Road, Huffpost, and the New York Times. Schwartz has been a member of the artist-run project The Binder of Women. After 20 years in Santa Monica, she now lives and works in El Cerrito, California.

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