NEW YORK, NY.- DC Moore Gallery presents Claire Sherman: New Pangaea, an exhibition of large-scale landscape paintings by Claire Sherman. Sherman’s current works represent the natural world in a manner that makes her landscapes both recognizable and utterly imaginative, inviting yet daunting. The distorted palette of deep blues and greens creates an enhanced vividness that is in tension with the dense mesh of branches broken and askew, and leaves and plants twisted and overgrown. Independent curator Melissa Messina describes Sherman’s paintings as, “vast entanglements, synthesized mixes of plant life and geographical phenomena that in their detail maintain a sense of specificity but in combination intentionally do not scribe an exact location. They are every place at once or no place at all.”
The exhibition’s title comes from the writings of environmental author Elizabeth Kolbert who has described the consequences of global travel and trade as “reshuffling of the biosphere that is bringing all of the worlds flora and fauna together,” thereby creating another super-continent, New Pangaea. Sherman both witnesses and explores extremes of climate change and the effects of invasive species crowding out native ones. There is a cycle of invasiveness, chaos, and growth, ever present in the paintings, as seen by nature’s tangled, undulating forms that flow off the canvas, and the roaring waterfalls that come crashing towards the viewer. The idea of a new environmental order, beautiful yet ominous, has become central to Sherman’s body of work.
Sherman’s method of painting is clear and direct. She avoids the overworked and achieves a surface imbued with a sense of ease and speed, open to imperfection. In all of her work, sustained research, reading, travel, and photography inform the act of painting.
Claire Sherman has exhibited widely throughout the United States and in Amsterdam, Leipzig, London, Seoul, and Turin. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Yaddo, and the Albers Foundation. She graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. She was recently included in the exhibition American Genre: Contemporary Painting at the ICA at Maine College of Art, curated by Michelle Grabner. Sherman is an Associate Professor at Drew University in New Jersey.
