Wes Sherman exhibits abstract paintings at Rahway's 1591 Gallery

Rahway Arts District’s 1591 Gallery, a nonprofit art gallery in the heart of downtown Rahway, opens a new exhibition of abstract paintings by notable New Jersey artist Wes Sherman on today, May 1.

The exhibit reception on Friday, May 9, 6-8 p.m., is free and open to the public. The gallery is located at 1591 Irving St., Rahway.

Sherman’s latest paintings are landscapes referencing the pristine beauty of the North American wilderness still found within the National Park system. Sherman’s love of painting and of paint itself, are apparent in his latest series of paintings. Using imagery of both epic and intimate scenes found in the National Parks as departure points, he continues his established studio practice of exploring color and abstraction in oil painting.
Sherman deftly uses a variety of painting techniques to convey mood, distance, and depth, while carving shape and pattern from paint on canvas to create layered atmospheric paintings that feel both real and imagined.

Sherman has been painting since 1992 and has had more than 30 solo shows. He received his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2003. He is the chair of exhibitions and a trustee at The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster. He has been a visiting artist at many universities among them Temple, Rutgers, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 2011 he also received a fellowship for painting from New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

More information on the artist can be found at WesShermanStudio.com. For directions and gallery information, visit Rahway-CoHQ.com.

Newcity Chicago, Some Abstraction Occurs

@ 65GRAND,  Jan 11 - Feb 9, 2008
PAMELA JORDEN, JASMINE JUSTICE, WES SHERMAN, WENDY WHITE  

PAMELA JORDEN, JASMINE JUSTICE, WES SHERMAN, WENDY WHITE, "Some Abstraction Occurs," painting. 65Grand’s cozy space serves up work by four divergent painters: Pamela Jordan, Jasmine Justice, Wes Sherman and Wendy White. Each of their practices occurs within the ever-widening field of contemporary abstract painting. The show highlights the plurality of recent approaches to painting without pictures. While each of the artists has his or her own charms, Jasmine Justice’s hot paintings are the most inventive in the room. Ms. Justice’s spontaneous strokes of prefab color form textile-like patterns on the surface only to be changed through the addition of other eccentric shapes. The effect is quirky and fresh, with a hint of mischievousness. Pamela Jordan’s works are significantly more somber. Their darkened shapes collide with each other in an insistently flat world. Each blobby shape interacts uniquely with the others and has its own type of gesture-as-texture. Ms. Jordan’s paintings feel like a crowded street full of people bumping shoulders. Also on view are Wes Sherman’s tightly rendered cartographic abstractions inspired by American romantic painters such as Frederic Remington or Winslow Homer, and Wendy White’s urban-inspired acidic neon and black gastrula paintings with spray paint. "Some Abstraction Occurs" explores what it means to try to paint for paint’s sake in 2008. (Dan Gunn)

 

Flavorpill, Some Abstraction Occurs

@ 65GRAND,  Jan 11 - Feb 9, 2008

Just when you thought painting for painting's sake had deserted our chilly city, an exhibition of painter's painters shows up at intimate gallery 65GRAND. Curator Tiffany Calvert pulls our conceptually clouded heads out of the snow with small works by four emerging abstract artists. Highlights include Pamela Jorden's Untitled oil-on-linen pieces — multi-tiered color explosions reminiscent of works by Bay Area abstractionists Richard Diebenkorn and David Park — and Wes Sherman's inscrutable silhouettes, which recall Luc Tuymans' sense of disrupted narrative. You may not know what you're looking at, but at this discombobulating exhibition, you certainly won't care.

Written by Patricia Coursonflavorpill, January 2008

 

Nashville Visual Arts Events, September 1-10

The Arts Company, Wes Sherman. Sherman bases his paintings on Old Master artworks, but not in the form of derivative visual quotations. He boils down the massings and colors of those works into graceful abstractions that echo the massings and colors of the older works. I find Sherman’s results stand on their own very well, but they serve as a gloss on these other paintings, pointing out ways to look at their essential structures. One of his paintings in this year’s show is based on O’Keefe’s Radiator Building, a tribute to this big piece of Nashville’s artistic legacy and a sad reminder of the possibility that the painting will leave town after the lawyers get done.

Written by David Maddox