Claire Sherman’s “New Pangaea” is on view at DC Moore Gallery, New York,
through April 6, 2019.

Claire Sherman’s current works represent the natural world in a manner thatmakes her landscapes both recognizable and utterly imaginative, inviting yetdaunting. The gallery says that distorted palette of deep blues and greens creates an enhanced vividness that is in tension with the dense mesh of branches broken and askew, and leaves and plants twisted and overgrown. Independent curator Melissa Messina describes Sherman’s paintings as, “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 scribe an exact location. They are every place at once or no place at all.”

The exhibition’s title “New Pangaea” comes from the writings of environmentalauthor Elizabeth Kolbert who has described the consequences of global travel and trade as “reshuffling of the biosphere that is bringing all of the world’s flora and fauna together,” thereby creating another supercontinent — New Pangaea. Sherman both witnesses and explores extremes of climate change and the effects of invasive species crowding out native ones. There is a cycle of invasiveness, chaos, and growth, ever present in the paintings, as seen by nature’s tangled, undulatingforms that flow off the canvas, and the roaring waterfalls that come crashingtowards the viewer. The idea of a new environmental order, beautiful yet ominous, has become central to Sherman’s body of work.

Claire Sherman has exhibited widely throughout the United States and inAmsterdam, Leipzig, London, Seoul, and Turin. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Yaddo, and the Albers Foundation. She graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. She was recently included in the exhibition “American Genre: Contemporary Painting” at the ICA at Maine College of Art, curated by Michelle Grabner. Sherman is an Associate Professor at Drew University in New Jersey.