Written by: Melissa Messina, independent curator, and author

More than “landscape paintings,” Claire Sherman’s grand-scale, visually-charged oils on canvas depicting cascading waterfalls, caves equally inviting and foreboding, and entropic plant life, can perhaps better be described as psychological portraits of environments in precarious balance. In these compositions, Sherman maintains a tension between representation and abstraction and an ominous beauty that together cultivates a compelling urgency for considering our ecosystem.

Sherman’s paintings are 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 ascribe an exact location. They are every place at once or no place at all. Collectively, these works seem to echo our wavering ability to be sensitive to and responsible for the unprecedented human manipulation of earth today.

Her approach to painting, delivered with a conscientious knowledge of the history embedded within it, astutely correlates these languages to how we interpret our physical surroundings today. In the works for this exhibition, Sherman once again employs the expressive language of abstraction, with varying levels of reserve and abandon, as metaphor for humankind’s manipulation of the land. Her often immense-scaled work calls upon notions of heroism, her potent gestures suggest a definite power and control, and her heightened palette alludes to artifice.

It is timely that Sherman, among another generation of American painters who have turned their artistic attention to the landscape, offers a renewed focus on the genre specifically and the environment more broadly. And it is hopeful to consider how this broadening mirrors the political moment in which new ways of thinking are being brought to the fore, and what these new perspectives may offer. Artistically, Claire Sherman’s paintings relate psychologically to how we experience landscape now, and her unique point of view can be seen as leading the charge toward such considerations. Translated through a mélange of distinctive—yet personal—experiences, sources, and lenses, they feel somehow truer to life in their composite falseness. Yet, rather than a macabre foretelling of a desolate, dystopic future,Sherman’s paintings instead uphold a reverence for balance. The works call forth the power of adaptability and affirm the worth of what there is to save.