Large Painting by Sean Scherer, "Ruhlman", dtd. 1999, 84" x 72" Diptych

Large acrylic on canvas, abstract work of translucent squares in tan, off-white, blues, grays, black and browns. Titled "Ruhlman". Dated 1999. Each panel is 84" x 36".

About:
Sean Scherer
(b. 1968)

Since completing his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sean Scherer has exhibited extensively in North America and Europe. For a number of years Sean lived in Buffalo where he taught at the University and had four one-person exhibitions at the Nina Freudenheim Gallery.

At the beginning of his career, his practice focused on painting and explored the complex pan-cultural repertoire of geometric abstraction as it has been manifested throughout art history. The Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century was of particular interest and the artist produced a large body of work that re-articulates and extends the formal vocabularies of that revolutionary movement.

The events of September 11, 2001 imposed a radical reassessment of his project, however, when he had to abandon his studio located near the World Trade Center, a three-year hiatus from art making ensued. Eventually, drawing provided Sean Scherer with a way to re-enter his artistic practice and he has focused primarily on this medium in recent years. (Excerpt from Nina Freudenheim Gallery exhibition announcement for Sean Scherer – New Works, April 14-May 17, 2012.)

Excerpt from Sarje, Kimmo. “Reviews, Helsinki, Sean Scherer, Galerie Forsblom | Helsinki.” Artforum (March 1992): 123. https://www.artforum.com/events/sean-scherer-217224/:

Time, the avant-garde, and Europe can be problematic concepts for American artists, but Sean Scherer’s paintings grow out of these concepts. His work seems to echo the dilemma that has faced the American esthetic in recent years: do we see more than what we see? In other words, does art also have a spiritual dimension? Scherer’s paintings take their point of departure from the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of the century, especially Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism. Many “neo-geo” artists have drawn from the same well, but Scherer takes his historical journey on his own terms. Not only is he interested in the visual rhetoric of the Russian avant-garde, he also investigates the paintings as historical objects. Everyone who has seen Malevich’s Black Square, 1915, in its present condition, knows that it is not black, that it has been oxidized to blue-gray, and that it is badly cracked. The process of aging—perhaps even becoming senile—of the avant-garde interests Scherer. It generates an organic component within the geometric vocabulary of his art; in several of his paintings the circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles also contain fine cracks, and the contrasts between the black, white, and primary colors have been muted with a mist-like patina.

Although Scherer simulates avant-garde rhetoric and imitates the patina of old paintings, he is not simply a retro painter. The anachronistic game is interrupted here and there by borrowings from the vocabulary of Pop art or of cartoon strips; the red star of the avant-garde becomes a contemporary pop-culture symbol. Thus, his paintings also problematize time. Whether this is a question of the death of history, of the random juxtaposition of the esthetics of different ages in the present, or of perceptive art-historical commentary is very much open to interpretation. To my mind. Scherer presents us with nostalgia, albeit with a sense of humor; his art tells us at least part of the truth about our relationship to the early-20th-century avant-garde.