FRAGMENTS: CLAIRE SHERMAN

19 Sep - 2 Nov 2025

CLAIRE SHERMAN
FRAGMENTS
Claire Sherman creates paintings that explore the tension inherent in the natural world, toeing the line between abstraction and representation while presenting the viewer with environments that are at once disquieting and alluring. Through extensive research trips that are integral to her artistic process, Sherman constructs imagined worlds shaped by elements drawn from firsthand experience, photographs and memory. Fragments reveals Sherman as the creator of relics of moments in time, where anonymity of place heightens the tension in the landscapes she is depicting. She rejects specificity, instead exploring the ubiquity and instability of landscape imagery. Paint becomes both image and geological record, leading to spaces that are fragmented and dissolve through the process of looking and observing. In Sherman’s words, “the choreography of paint in my work is meant to create a visceral, chaotic reaction rather than remaining a mere representation of experience.”
Wildflowers, 2024

Oil on canvas

42 x 36 inches

During the pandemic, Sherman turned to local subjects, such as wildflowers – plants that thrive along roadsides, return quickly after wildfires, and persist in unexpected places – seeing them as symbols of resilience and intimacy. The viewer is presented with detailed, dense and tangled forms that are intimate in scale, at once coming together and falling apart, suggesting both delicate fragility and persistence. Similarly on the edge of formation and collapse, yet on a larger scale, Sherman’s cave and canyons paintings immerse viewers in spaces that feel both ancient and unstable, where solid ground seems to shift beneath the eye. Rendered in dense, gestural layers of paint, these works evoke the strata of rock while simultaneously dissolving into abstraction, creating a tension between solidity and collapse. These paintings extend her exploration of the sublime, presenting landscapes that oscillate between solidity and dissolution, inviting the viewer into terrains that are as unstable as they are seductive.
In addition to research trips, Sherman draws on literature and philosophy for stimulus in creating her paintings. Rather than directly illustrating theory, she uses ideas of the sublime and the limits of perception as a conceptual backdrop. This unresolved tension – between what can be seen and what resists comprehension – shapes much of her approach to painting. Furthermore, writers such as Isabella Bird, Edward Abby, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rebecca Solnit, and Terry Tempest Williams have been foundational in the way Sherman considers the direction of her work and its relationship to climate change.
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Wildflowers, 2024

Oil on canvas

30 x 26 inches

Claire Sherman was born in 1981 in Oberlin, Ohio. She 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, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at DC Moore Gallery, New York; Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah; PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL; and KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY. Recent group exhibitions include Robischon Gallery, Denver CO; SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, IL; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; The Orange Advisory, Minneapolis, MN; and DC Moore Gallery, New York. Sherman's work is included in numerous collections including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the UBS collections in London and the United States, and the Margulies Collection in Miami. Sherman is a Professor at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York City.
- Waterfall, 2017
  Oil on board
  10 x 8 inches