Jane Swavely was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1959 and lives and works in New York. Her paintings develop a deeply atmospheric form of abstraction, balancing romanticism and minimalism through luminous colour, veiled surfaces and intuitive composition.
Swavely’s works often suggest screens, portals or thresholds. Areas of saturated colour are placed against passages where paint has been wiped, dissolved or partially removed, allowing underlying tones and ghostly forms to emerge. The paintings appear to hover between presence and disappearance, with silver tones, dark grounds and chromatic flashes producing an effect that is both alchemical and cinematic.
Her practice is guided by intuition and memory. Rather than constructing images through fixed systems, Swavely allows each painting to emerge from a subconscious process of layering, erasure and return. The result is an abstraction that feels intimate yet expansive, grounded in material process while remaining open to psychological and atmospheric readings.
Swavely studied at Boston University College of Fine Arts and the School of Visual Arts in New York. During the early 1980s, she worked as an assistant to Lois Lane and later to Brice Marden. She held her first solo exhibition at CDS Gallery, New York, in 1986, and later became closely associated with A.I.R. Gallery, the historic women-run artists’ space founded in the 1970s.
Recent solo exhibitions include Magenta Plains, New York; kaufmann repetto, Milan; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Mandeville Gallery at Union College. Her work is included in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection and Union College.