Claire Sherman
dal 11/1/2007 al 9/2/2007
Segnalato da
11/1/2007
Claire Sherman
Houldsworth Gallery, London
Sherman’s paintings are rich and seductive, providing all the painterly expression that one looks for in a "meaningful" landscape picture. She fills the canvas with vibrant colour and gestural abandon. Painter's sophistication with paint is such that she surfs the boundaries of genres.
New Paintings
Houldsworth is proud to present the first UK solo show of young
Chicago based painter Claire Sherman, whose work offers a dynamic
approach to current critiques of romanticism and its traditions.
Sherman’s paintings are rich and seductive, providing all the
painterly expression that one looks for in a ‘meaningful’
landscape picture. However, Sherman’s work is far from naive or
expressionist, it at once fills the canvas with vibrant colour and
gestural abandon, whilst providing the unnerving plasticised
emptiness of a contemporary master such as Alex Katz. Indeed,
Sherman’s sophistication with paint is such that she surfs the
boundaries of genres and, as the artist comments, “what remains is a
play between fullness and emptiness, abstraction and representation,
the synthetic and natural." Although many artists talk in terms of
binary contradictions, Sherman’s work bears testimony to such a grey
area of understanding, mixing an uncanny ability to mimic the chaos
of the natural world, with a beguiling ability to simplify phenomena
into effecting stylistic conceits.
Sherman ensures that she gives the viewer as rich a surface as
possible, the quality being one of cinematic spectacle, using
dramatic lighting and oblique ang50 Pall Mall Depositles to create a sense of suspense,
whilst suggesting a suspension in time - a freeze frame from a
larger narrative. Sherman’s world is, perhaps, an anterior place,
filling our perceptual field with the writhing intensity of her
unfaltering gaze. In this anterior world details become exaggerated,
propelling out of the chaos; a particular colour comes to dominate, a
vertical mark of a blade of grass becomes a retinal slash. Such a
visceral language of paint truly begins where words leave off.
Sherman’s painting seems to make this the starting point of their
dialogue with a media saturated contemporary sublime. Playing with
the ambivalence of the sublime which, as Burke warned, in its Houldsworth
50 Pall Mall Deposit
124-128 Barlby Road
London
concrete depiction can so easily slip into something grotesque,
Sherman creates at times a simple poetry of landscape and form and at
others offers satiation to the point of explosion.
Having enjoyed immediate success following her 2005 MFA degree show,
Sherman has already exhibited widely with her Chicago gallery Kavi
Gupta, and her work is in important collections across America
including the Margulies Collection, Miami. Sherman is Assistant
Professor of Art at Knox College, Illinois.
Preview (with artist present) Thursday 11 January 6 - 8.30 pm
Houldsworth
50 Pall Mall Deposit 124-128, Barlby Road - London