KATE SHERMAN
BIRCH 13
2020
OIL ON PANEL
H 42.5 cm W 48.5 cm
UNIQUE
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kate Sherman was born in 1970 and studied Fine Art at Birmingham from 1990-93. For 10 years she worked in London for a large contemporary art gallery, before deciding in 2005 to paint full time. Today, she lives and works near Brighton in Sussex.
Various themes run through much of Sherman’s work such as memory, longing and transience. There are often recurring subjects: blossom; forests and woodland; dwellings, which are sometimes blurred as if seen from a moving vehicle. The imagery originates from photographs she has taken of her surrounding landscape. This photographic source is important because the paintings capture a reflective notion of memory, of the emotional distance between a real landscape and a photograph, between experience and longing. The work has a poignancy that often mediates warm familiarity with a sense of foreboding. There is also a quiet melancholy, reminiscent of Edward Hopper, that is expressed both by the portrayal of sparse unpopulated landscapes containing elemental traces of man, and by the restrained palette suffused in a reserved northern European light.

