Claire Sherman Biography

By moving further away from our stable human scale, Sherman creates paintings that challenge the comfortable anthropomorphic lens through which we understand the world. Signifying elements become obliterated and viewers are cast without an anchor into the harrowing alien reality of what the world may be like if it was not held together by our biological faculties. In this sense, Sherman captures what it means to have realist ontology. While her paintings have pushed further and further away from works that share a likeness to how we view the natural world, they are instead a greater embrace of how this world may exist differently as we move beyond our evolutionary capacities. Sherman nods to this interpretation in her works. Her aesthetic is often understood as a contemporary reinterpretation of one of the central questions for the philosophy of science at the end of the 19th century. For poets and painters alike, this was the negotiation between transcendentalism (the sublime, the infinite) with a new realism that brought forth the idea that there is a real world that is beyond our empirical understanding. This tension, which arguably remains yet to be reconciled, is the ripe conceptual premise to much of Sherman’s approach to painting.

Sherman’s paintings have been exhibited throughout America and Europe, including solo exhibitions such as Sempervirens at the DC Moore Gallery, New York; Sequoiadendron Giganteum at the Good Children Gallery, New Orleans; Palms Wild at Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin and a self-titled exhibition at the Houldsworth Gallery, London, the DCKT Contemporary, New York, and Galerie Hof & Huyser, Amsterdam, and has an upcoming show at Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin in 2015. Select group exhibitions include The 7 Borders at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville; Woods, Lovely, Dark, and Deep at the DC Moore Gallery, New York; Girls Just Want to Have Funds at the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York; Do Not Destroy at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco and Free Range: Painting and the University of Pennsylvania at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Sherman’s work has been reviewed in such publications as the Chicago Tribune, Art Ltd, Art Agenda, and Flash Art. Sherman completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005.