Despite the fact that digital images are unable to adequately showcase the energetic brushwork of Claire Sherman’s paintings, collectors still clammer at the opportunity to acquire a piece as soon as they are available.
The Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta has presold — in large part through JPEGs — his current exhibition of paintings by Claire Sherman, a 2005 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “We debuted a painting at Basel last year, and Marty Margulies bought it,” he said, referring to a major Miami collector. “Since then we’ve been selling her work based on digital images.” The show opened this weekend, but it has been sold out since December, with prices up to $15,000.
There are also the inaccuracies created whenever a three-dimensional work is captured in two dimensions. The texture of a painting especially, experts warn, is bound to get lost in translation. As Mr. Gupta put it: “A JPEG will give you a general picture but usually will not deliver the surface detail at all.” With Claire Sherman’s work, for example, “you’re not going to see the energy of the brushwork,” he said.