Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present Brink, Claire Sherman’s second solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery. Sherman’s new series of paintings expands on her use of the landscape as a subject while addressing tragedy, romanticism and ambivalence. Philosophical writings on the sublime and existentialism influence her recent paintings that depict scenes of vast open spaces, cliffs, ravines, rapids, and other ominous topography.
Brink refers to this fragile state in the environment where a disastrous event is evident. Sherman’s approach is bold and painterly working with large sweeping brushstrokes, from thin to overly thick areas of paint, as her images waver between abstraction and representation. Her scenes are over-sized, forcefully projecting the viewer into her world, sometimes floating above or below the landscape. Her handling of paint, surface and scale is used to seduce while emphasizing the fragility and power of these places. The choice of landscape is deliberately idiosyncratic; the scenes can be anywhere or anything: tropical, arctic, lunar, or mundane. However, despite the hopeful curiosity this variety implies, emptiness pervades each environment.
Claire Sherman (b. 1981, Ohio) lives and works in Chicago. Sherman will be included in an upcoming exhibition titled Future Tense Reshaping the Landscape at the Neuberger Museum of Art, NY. Sherman recently had a solo exhibition at Houldsworth Gallery in London and has recently participated in group shows at Samson Projects, Boston, Galleria Glance, Turin, Beverly Art Center, IL and at Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery in Chicago. Her work has exhibited widely with Kavi Gupta Gallery and is included in numerous important collections such as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS, The Margulies Collection and UBS Bank Art Collection.
