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Georgia Scherman Projects is pleased to announce About 1865, a solo show of new work by Tony Scherman. The American Civil War is the subject of this new series of paintings and drawings. The exhibition catalogue (co-published with Winston Wachter Fine Art in New York) features an essay by art critic and writer Lilly Wei.
In incubation for some 35 years, the release of this series coincides with the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (March 25, 1807). While slavery has changed over the past two hundred years, it has not been eradicated.
Large close-up portraits of the warís protagonists ~ Lincoln, Lee, Grant and Sherman ~ are presented alongside anonymous African Americans entitled Walk On, No Lines, underlying what Scherman sees to be a white manís war, with its protagonists and heroes all white. He says, ìWhenever I ask people about this war they list off Lee and Lincoln etc., only once have I heard anyone mention Frederic Douglasî. The lower legs and feet of a lynching hang beside a pheasant entitled Atlanta: Better Days.
Scherman has painted in encaustic, the process of mixing pigment with wax, for over thirty years. The multiple layers of coloured wax on canvas ~ some thick, some thin, others bearing areas scraped back with a knife, or burnt away with an iron ~ result in both a visceral experience and sculptural appearance. As described by Leah Ollman in Art and America, the works are ìimmediate and palpable, as in the witnessing of a cataclysmic force of nature, whose violent beauty at once seduces and dismaysî. The chaos of the subjects and their themes are echoed in the chaos at the surface of the works themselves.
Tony Scherman, born in Toronto in 1950, received an M.A. from the Royal College of Art in London, England, in 1974. Since then he has exhibited his works in solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe. He has also been a visiting critic and lecturer at universities, art colleges and art galleries in North America and Europe. About 1865 will be on exhibition in New York at Winston Wachter Fine Art in May of 2007. |
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