Kimball Art Center

Park City, Utah Art Center

Claire Sherman: Here Now

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Join Us for a virtual Art Talk with Claire Sherman on Wednesday, November 17, 2021. 

How does an artist engage with the long history of landscape painting in the 21st century? What makes it relevant to our contemporary experience? Claire Sherman grapples with these questions, pushing against the romanticism of the genre and depicting landscapes as they gradually dissolve into abstraction. Her invented scenes of forests, caves, rocks, and grasses—composites of found imagery that she has collected over time, or synthesized from her photographs—are ultimately not interested in a truthful representation of place, but instead attempt to address our larger relationship with both the natural world and with contemporary media.

Sherman’s scenes are strangely seductive, beckoning us into the immersive, visceral quality of the large-scale canvases. The ubiquity of her imagery lends them coherency yet, upon approach, they collapse. What was a stem, trunk, or rock from afar turns into painterly exuberance; details decompose into abstracted lines and planes of paint. Sherman excels at extending this tension between the landscape’s illusory depth and a gestural mark-making, drawing attention to the inherent flatness of each painting’s surface. Occupying this in-between space, she focuses on the intimacy and immediacy of her works, wanting them to relate to our current moment, to the here now.

Claire Sherman Art Talk

 

Claire Sherman bio:

Claire Sherman received her B.A. from The University of Pennsylvania and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Yaddo, The Albers Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at PATRON Gallery, Chicago; DC Moore Gallery, NY; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; KMAC Museum, Louisville; Houldsworth Gallery, London; DCKT, New York; Aurobora, San Francisco; and Hof and Huyser Gallery, Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland; Sun Valley Museum of Art, Ketchum, Idaho; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Suburban Riverwest, Milwaukee; Gallery Seomi, Seoul; The New Gallery, Austria; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY. Sherman is an Associate Professor at Drew University and is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York and PATRON Gallery in Chicago.

2021 Wasatch Back Student Art Show

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The Wasatch Back Student Art Show is Kimball Art Center’s annual celebration of our community’s youngest artists. All Kindergarten through 12th grade students in Summit and Wasatch counties are invited to participate, creating work around a common theme. This year’s theme, inspired by the work of Marie Watt, Adrian Esparza, and Elodie Blanchard, is our material culture. The unfettered imagination of these highly skilled and creative students produces artworks that are both revealing and thought-provoking. 

 

“As a mother of 5 children, business entrepreneur, and founder of a not-for-profit independent K- 8 school, I am a proponent of art education for our student community. Kimball Art Center offers students education in art and hands-on experience to learn what art is all about, what it means, and why was it is made? Through Kimball’s commitment to spread the love of art, students improve their critical thinking skills, communication, discipline, creativity, and self-esteem.

Congratulations to the participating students for making this year’s exhibit a success.’ – Tomilee Tilley

The Wasatch Back Student Art Show is supported by Tomilee Tilley Family Fund and Rocky Mountain Power Foundation.