The George Adams Gallery opens an exhibition of works by Katherine Sherwood
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Tuesday, October 15, 2024


The George Adams Gallery opens an exhibition of works by Katherine Sherwood
Katherine Sherwood, Purple Carnations (After C.P.) 2022. Mixed media on found cotton duck, 40 x 48 inches.



NEW YORK, NY.- The George Adams Gallery is presenting its exhibition of paintings by Bay Area artist Katherine Sherwood titled, Pandemic Madonnas and Other Views from the Garden. Building on two on-going bodies of work, her Venuses and Brain Flowers, the exhibition shows the evolution of both series while also introducing Sherwood’s Pandemic Madonnas, completed within the past year. Accompanying the exhibition is an extensively illustrated catalogue, In the Garden of the Yelling Clinic, surveying the development of all three, ongoing bodies of work, with scholarly essays by Ginny Treanor and Farley Gwazda, along with a personal reflection by the artist.

Sherwood has long used her artwork to engage with concerns around disability and feminism, by considering how both ableism and gender play a role in our understanding of art from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Herself disabled following a debilitating cerebral hemorrhage at forty-four, in the decades since, such concerns have only become more urgent and visible in Sherwood’s work. In these recent paintings, she continues with her strategy of making revisionist additions to art historical images, collaging in scans of her own brain or depicting her subjects with assistive medical devices – particularly those she uses herself. Simultaneously, she has deepened her exploration of the historical precedent of female artists, notably in a major self-portrait after an altarpiece by the 17th century Portuguese painter, Josefa de Óbidos. While the original painting combines elements from devotional paintings and still-lives, a hallmark of de Óbidos’s oeuvre, Sherwood replaces the central Christ child with her own disabled body, offering a two-fold critique: of the limitations in subject matter female painters historically faced and the liberating potential of the self-portrait.




The duality present in Venus (after de Óbidos) reflects two broader, inter-related aspects of Sherwood’s work. She addresses the concept of the male gaze and preconceived notions of beauty in her Venus paintings, modeled after classical odalisques, while the Brain Flower series flips the script, re-inserting the female gaze by considering the work of Renaissance female painters, who were often limited in their subject matter to still-lives. As art historian Ginny Treanor points out in her contribution to the catalogue, for the women whose paintings Sherwood appropriates, the floral arrangements they painted were as much a scientific enterprise as an artistic one. Following in this tradition, by replacing select flowers with collaged scans of her own brain; Sherwood draws a parallel between the beauty and complexity within both structures.

Another commonality across these series is the use of art historical reproductions as a substrate, where Sherwood is literally working on the back of historical paintings or, as in the case of her Pandemic Madonnas, on the front. Working from examples of the Madonna and Child by Dürer, Botticelli, Raphael and others, she directly alters the image, adding in prosthetics, braces, crutches and other devices to the subjects as a commentary on the immaculate, idealized body. Pointedly, Sherwood intentionally models these interventions after antiquated, outdated medical devices, further drawing attention to our preconceptions around the visible markers of disability. A seated Madonna may be placed in a wheelchair, the baby Jesus given a prosthetic limb or brace, however the effect is not to undermine, but rather transcend. As these paintings were intended to reveal the divine as more perfect beings, Sherwood’s manipulations offer a more nuanced understanding of our inherent humanity.

As Sherwood discusses the trajectory of her work over the last ten years in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, she elaborates on her understanding of the “Garden” as a conceptual extension of the imaginary “Yelling Clinic:” a space for healing that has served as the inspiration for her paintings since 2010. The Yelling Clinic is also a disability collective Sherwood co-founded in 2008, which among its goals, combines art and activism to move conversations around disability outside a medical context. For Sherwood, the interventions and re-contextualizing she manifests within her paintings are in themselves acts of healing and therefore an extension of her activism. Her “Garden” is home to the Brain Flowers, where the blooms she paints are equally reminders of mortality and objects of beauty in their own right.










Today's News

September 11, 2022

Museums in the U.S. and Europe are in blockbuster mode

'Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings & Structures' opens at Paula Cooper Gallery

Bortolami opens an exhibition of works by Faith Wilding

Exhibition brings together new and classic works by Jun Kaneko

83 year old artist has show at Housatonic Museum

'Louise Bourgeois: Paintings' opens at New Orleans Museum of Art

Almine Rech presents Tursic & Mille's sixth solo show with the gallery

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art opens an exhibition of works by Johnnie Winona Ross

The George Adams Gallery opens an exhibition of works by Katherine Sherwood

A filmmaker explores David Bowie's life and finds clarity about his own

New exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary shows water in its least familiar form

Chiffon Thomas' first solo exhibition with P·P·O·W opens in New York

Haus der Kunst opens the most comprehensive survey of Joan Jonas' work in Germany to date

Montclair Art Museum opens 'Lori Field: Tiger Tarot'

Tina Ramirez, founder of a leading Hispanic dance troupe, dies at 92

Yale University Art Gallery presents an exhibition of sculpture by Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè

The Polygon Gallery presents the Canadian premiere of Stan Douglas's Venice Biennale exhibition, 2011 ≠1848

Exhibition at Denny Dimin Gallery includes the work of international and locally based artists

Lars Vogt, acclaimed pianist and conductor, is dead at 51

Issy Wood met power players in art and music. She went her own way.

Mentors named for next class in Rolex arts initiative

Mable John, soul singer with a star-studded resume, dies at 91

Citygroup presents Azza Aboualam: Coral Walls and Green Awnings: Mosques in Sharjah and New York City




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful