Claire Sherman’s work focuses on how our cognition distinguishes what is wholly abstract from what has been abstracted from our normal perception. In this investigation, Sherman has rightfully chosen the subject matter that has been at the crux of this discourse for centuries - the infinite attributes of nature, seen and unseen. Sherman’s paintings of exposed islands and chaotic forest interiors challenge us to encounter unpredictable, wild nature through the emphatic materiality of paint. Existing in tension with landscape archetypes, the paintings evoke specific places that could also be anything, anywhere.
Sherman distorts scale, color, and perspective to create “unraveling environments.” Branches bowed by fringes of moss sweep across the canvas and plunge back into space. Angular limbs appear silhouetted amidst the searing blues and agitated brushstrokes of the night forest beyond. In these works, the artist’s approach to subject matter and paint handling finds a parallel in her interest in epiphytes—plants that grow on top of one another in the tree canopy. As artist, curator and critic Michelle Grabner wrote, “Landscape, albeit a traditional genre, has become a difficult category of engagement in contemporary painting simply because its pictorial limitations are nearly impossible to explore anew. Yet Claire Sherman is dedicated to landscape’s potential, and her large, complex compositions effortlessly depict the logic of the natural world while also tumbling into disorientating abstraction.”
Through accumulation and close attention to the specific, Sherman builds a landscape that is not only physical but psychological. Her work not only refines our powers of discernment, but also suggests analogies with our own vascular systems and as such helps us to sense the effects of our surrounding natural world. At the same time, Sherman’s compositions evoke fairy tales and John Tenniel’s dramatic illustrations, at once threatening and inviting. She renders deep spaces and dares us to try to penetrate them.
With each work, Sherman engages with philosophical discourse on the sublime, and is influenced by the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-François Lyotard who discussed the sublime and the beauty of the natural world. Her aesthetic is often understood as a contemporary reinterpretation of one of the central questions for the philosophy of science at the end of the 19th century. For poets and painters alike, this was the negotiation between transcendentalism, and its preoccupation with the sublime, with a new realism, which brought forth the idea that there is a real world that is beyond our empirical understanding. This tension, which arguably remains yet to be reconciled, is the ripe conceptual premise to much of Sherman’s approach to painting.
Claire Sherman was born in 1981 in Oberlin, Ohio. She received her B.A. from The University of Pennsylvania and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Yaddo, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; Houldsworth Gallery, London; Aurobora, San Francisco; and Hof and Huyser Gallery, Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Gallery Seomi, Seoul, The New Gallery, Austria; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY. Sherman's work is included in numerous collections including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the UBS collections in London and the United States, and the Margulies Collection in Miami. Sherman is an Assistant Professor at Drew University,and lives and works in New York City.