About
Pippy Houldsworth is very pleased to present the second solo exhibition in London of young Chicago artist Claire Sherman from 18 September to 31 October 2009. Sherman gained her MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago in 2005 and is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Knox College, Illinois. She has recently been awarded The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Scholarship and relocated earlier this month to Brooklyn, New York for the Space Program 2009-10.
Sherman's semi-abstract landscape paintings portray a precocious confidence and bold expansiveness in her handling of paint and materials, balanced with a fine delicacy and deftness of touch. The idiosyncratic scenes of forests, rivers, desert or undergrowth explore the fragility of nature, exposing elements too often ignored, the cracks in a parched earth, water holes, caked mud, the darkness in the forest, the space between the trees. Sherman studiously investigates these non-places, seducing the viewer with lush hues, sweeping brushstrokes and thick layering of paint. Whilst exploring the depths of human existence, and with metaphors abounding throughout the work, Sherman's paintings are imbued with a sense of hope informed by her long-term interest in the sublime and existentialism.
Claire Sherman has exhibited widely throughout the world and is in important collections internationally, including the Margulies Collection, Miami, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas, UBS London, UBS Washington, and Wellington Management, London and Boston. Recent solo exhibitions include Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, DCKT, New York, Hof & Huyster, Amsterdam and Aurobrora Press, San Francisco. Recent group exhibitions include Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, 2008, On Paper, the Gahlberg Arts Center, Illionois, USA 2009, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Wintergarten: Scott Anderon, Adam Scott, and Claire Sherman, Kavi Gupta, Berlin. Sherman's work has been included in numerous publications including The Martin Z Margulies Collection, Painting and Sculpture 2008, New American Painting, Mid-Atlantic Region 2006 and Moreover, Practicing Representation and Abstraction, The Beverley Art Center, Chicago, 2006.
