Claire Sherman, Funeral Mountain: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607

Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Funeral Mountain, a new series of paintings by Claire Sherman.

Gestural and heroic, Claire Sherman’s canvases investigate the confusion of scale and space. Purposefully composed in a single day, each composition originates from a specific place and is executed in a limited period of time. Sherman intentionally retains all of the stumbles, victories, and awkward brushstrokes that lay tangled on the surfaces of each heavily worked canvas.

The central subjects of this exhibition are the Funeral Mountains, part of the Amargosa Range, the chain that hugs the California/Nevada border and forms the eastern wall of Death Valley. It is a place Sherman visits frequently to hike and document the unusual rock formations. Hot, arid and uninhabitable, the valley tests a visitor’s senses seducing them with its beauty while punishing them with its harsh climate.

Austere and pale, this series of large canvases plays with the ever-present tension between illusionistic depths and the reality of the flat painterly surface. Focusing on sheer rock walls and sepulchral caves, these works distort perspective and gravity, carrying forward the relevant and ongoing investigation of the unlimited potential of space. Sherman inserts the viewer into locations composed of opposites, simultaneously finite and vast, humble and sublime.

Sherman graduated in 2005 with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received her BA from University of Pennsylvania in 2003. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. Her work is in numerous public and private collections. Funeral Mountain (2015) is Sherman’s fourth solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery. Sherman lives and works in New York City.