IS

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present IS, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Bruce M. Sherman.

Oscillating between representation and abstraction, utility and aesthetics, humor and sincerity, Sherman’s hand built and wheel thrown ceramic sculptures point to a wide-ranging continuum of art historical reference points from cubist strategies to modes of surrealism to traditional forms of pottery. The artist’s allegorical, albeit elusive, figurative constructions are suffused with open ended narratives that are at once as personal as they are universal.

This presentation foregrounds recent works that span theoretical ideas of awareness, cyclical energies, transformation, renewal, and rebirth. Here Sherman mixes and recasts repeated motifs — eyes, hands, feet, arrows, plants— to add an encoded poetic and lyrical element that reflects his own humanist language and philosophies.

Each of the figures possess a life-like spirit that suggests potential action and are arranged in relationship to one another to form narratives within their own sculptural vignettes. IS represents a collective endeavor, in which the artist’s cast of characters— and their attendant symbologies— are gathered to celebrate and echo a mantra of the forces of Great Nature.

Bruce M. Sherman lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York, NY; South Willard, Los Angeles, CA; and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan. Additionally, Sherman has a solo exhibition planned for winter at Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels. Sherman has been included in group exhibitions at Brennan and Griffin, New York; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Museo Regional Michoacano, Morelia, Mexico; Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles; Front Desk Apparatus, New York; The Pit, Los Angeles; Regina Rex, New York; among others. Sherman’s work will be included in a group exhibition at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT in 2018.