Claire Sherman: "Palms Wild" at Kavi Gupta Gallery
by James Yood, art ltd., May 2011
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Art historians used to posit that artists from Venice were particularly sensitive landscape painters because their daily environment was so bereft of things like trees and grass and hills that a Venetian could feel a longing for nature that only absence and alienation can create, a vulnerable hunger that makes their images even more poignant and forlorn. Well, we're all Venetians now, probably more collectively disenfranchised and exiled from our environment than any humans in history. And the degree to which the paintings of Claire Sherman raise that clarion call--that art about nature can provide a special parallel zone of humanity and metaphor, that through communion with the observed world we can touch something important and central to who and what and where we are--made this a very intriguing exhibition. That landscape painting itself isn't exhausted from several hundred years of overwork by thousands of artists, that endless mediocre repetition and knee-jerk cliches haven't made it completely descend into a vacant parody of itself is proved by Sherman's work, which throughout this show seems fresh and pertinent, painted with gusto, big and brassy, and always informed by observation tempered by intelligence.
There are never any humans present in Sherman's work; these trees, cacti, buttes, cliffs and caves are "pure" nature, seemingly unsullied by human narrative or exploitation. Sherman is present, though, and makes herself an issue here through slight dislocations and marginally askew compositional and paint-handing decisions that make her images refuse to behave as landscape paintings usually do. Sometimes her point of view seems too close to or too far from her motif, or her subjects are isolated and shown denuded from a context of sky and milieu. Or the image appears too roomy or too cramped, in the latter case as if we're looking at a detail from a slightly larger composition. At times, her paint handling seems diffident and perfunctory then seems
to erupt in a frenzy of slathering pigment. This continual process of reconsideration is just disorienting enough to keep things fresh. Nature is a big thing, after all, and Sherman never presents it as Eden or Hell or some neutral vessel to be filled with human anxieties, hopes, or fears, but rather as a complex and fundamental ur-motif that we just have to return to again and again, acknowledged and respected, though never to be solved.
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KaviGupta_Review117.pdf
Claire Sherman's 'Palms Wild' at Kavi Gupta, CHICAGO
by Michelle Grabner, Art Agenda, April 5, 2011
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Representational landscape is a risky genre. Its natural grandeur and boundless perspectives can seduce, instilling wonder and discovery. Yet more often, the genre triggers trite familiarity with both the subject and the material quality of the medium. Claire Sherman, however, with her nimble brushwork and compositional restraint, manages to navigate the perceptual underpinnings of landscape painting while confidently delivering its abstract realities. Back in the 19th century, Albert Bierstadt, a virtuoso at conjuring the extreme picturesque dazzling landscapes of the American West, elicited profound consternation from his critics. His depictions of glimmering mountain valleys, spectrum flecked waterfalls, and incandescent sunsets were shunned for their shameless idealism and their gaudy staging of the sublime. The only similarity that Claire Sherman shares with Bierstadt is an uncommonly large canvas size and the desire to demonstrate the profound magnitude in the natural world wrought by virtue of paint. Yet where Beirstadt employed fantastic illusionist devices to convey dense atmospheric perspectives, Sherman conversely models the physical properties of paint to constitute the organic and inorganic structures of landscape.
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Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review114.pdf
Claire Sherman
by Chris Miller, New City, March 28, 2011
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Claire Sherman’s decorative landscapes offer the explosive joy of youth, which is probably why, five years into her career, she has had solo shows in New York, London and Amsterdam, as well as this, her second show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. The gallery sales pitch suggests that she is questioning the “historical distinction between abstraction and representation,” as it can be questioned with paintings going back to the Lascaux caves. Other critics have connected her work to the Romantic era and Kant’s notion of the sublime, while it might also be noted that her kind of brush-driven landscape was first developed in Han Dynasty China.
Antiquated as it may be, her work feels as fresh as tomorrow because she’s not looking back. Like Faulkner’s characters in “Wild Palms,” the title she has borrowed for this exhibition, Sherman is exploring her own destiny which, this time around, includes some chthonic visits into enormous caves and a few almost figurative monumental still-lifes. Though traditional in many ways, the one tradition that’s been avoided is European landscape. There are few shadows, and no clouds or natural light. Her paintings are not windows looking out at the natural world. They are the natural world crashing in and dominating a wall. Rather than following the Impressionist way of breaking down the components of light, Sherman breaks down areas of color into jagged, rectangular patches, the way that computer graphics do. Rather than presenting a specific view, each image feels more like an ideogram.
With its architectural scale, use of brushwork and close-up focus on nature, her work resembles those historic Japanese screens that were shown at the Art Institute two years ago, except that the broken angularity creates an effect that is triumphantly rambunctious rather than contemplatively peaceful. Claire Sherman’s natural world is bustling with the unpredictable energy of scruffy trees that grow through the pavement of abandoned parking lots, making a room full of her work as overwhelming as a landslide. If art galleries were sports arenas, we’d all have to stand up and cheer. (Chris Miller)
Through April 19 at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 West Washington
The Ugly Beauty of Life In A Moment
by Lori Waxman, Chicago Tribune, March 4, 2011
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Folk religion from Iceland to Japan has long held such imaginative possibilities as the reality of our natural world. Claire Sherman's monumental paintings, on display at Kavi Gupta Gallery, are another bearer of geological and floral animation.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review109.pdf
Must-See Painting Shows: February
New Americans Paintings Blog, February, 2011
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It’s February now, which means plenty of snow and plenty of new shows opening this month. The editorial staff at New American Paintings have put together a list of more than 65 of the top painting exhibitions on view at private galleries across the country in February—from New York to Los Angeles, Houston to Chicago, Atlanta, and more—including more than a dozen shows from artists previously included in New American Paintings and featuring more than 50 notable and not-to-be-missed shows from across the country.
EDITORS PICK - Angel Otero, February 17 – April 10, 2011, Lehman Maupin;
EDITOR’S PICK - Claire Sherman, February 19 – March 26, 2011, Kavi Gupta Gallery
You've Seen the E-Mail, Now Buy the Art
by Jori Finkel, The New York Times, February 4, 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review43.pdf
Claire Sherman Slow Pan
by Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune, March 2, 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review45.pdf
Claire Sherman
by Josh Tyson, Time Out Chicago, March 15-21, 2007
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review42.pdf
Today's Landscapes, Tomorrow's Dystopia
by Benjamin Gennochio, The New York Times, June 1, 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review38.pdf