Sherman Sam
Sherman Sam is a writer and artist based in London and Singapore.
Letter from London
By Sherman SamUnlike Ireland, where there seems to be a sympathy towards both the painterly and the abstract, Britain has long maintained a figurative tradition and held abstraction at arm’s length.
Letter From LONDON
By Sherman SamSince the Tate split into Modern and Britain, most of the glory as well as the tourists have flooded into the former power station on the South Bank, very much leaving Tate Britain as a quieter gem of a venue. Still, its Tate Triennial is one of the few events directed toward the current state of art here.
Letter From London
By Sherman SamSummer’s over, but Rothko (Tate Modern), Bacon (Tate Britain), Warhol’s television and films (The Hayward), and new Gerhard Richters (Serpentine Gallery) have all arrived in London. Robert Irwin is having his first–ever exhibition here at White Cube (well, for me that’s a blockbuster).
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamFriends and critics have been entirely charmed by the exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre. The Guardian’s Adrian Serle describes it as “inexplicably odd.
Letter From LONDON
By Sherman SamIt seems as if this spring is a moment for sculpture, and, in particular, women sculptors. Following a two-year refurbishment, the Whitechapel Gallery is back with two bold women; a stunning Isa Genzken survey and a yearlong commission by the Polish-born 2008 Turner Prize nominee, Goshka Macuga.
Letter From DUBLIN
By Sherman SamWhat is drawing if not thinking in action. It is the easiest, quickest, most expansive, sometimes laziest, and most challenging of forms.
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamToday time seems to be moving faster. A visit to Times Square isn’t necessary to experience this. Just glance at your iPhone and watch the e-mails tick by; that is, we have so many distractions that slowing down seems nearly impossible. Two shows in London offer interesting perspectives on this.
Report from London
By Sherman SamWith the hedonistic grandeur of the World Cup (that month-long international festival of soccer) upon us, as well as the Basel Art Fair attracting art world consumers, the month in London seems more about the ephemeral than the epic.
Report from London
By Sherman SamRepresentation and narrative seem to be the pervasive components of our current visual culture. Yet the idea of describing reality and telling its stories can take many forms, from painting to printmaking, that have served story-telling very well in the past. And now with installation, a form whose verisimilitude can reach greater heights of realism than most, we seem to have attained a state of “hyperreality.”
Letter from London
By Sherman SamGiven our penchant for narrative and fictions these days, the enormity of artists’ projects and attempts at world-making seems to grow and grow. The artist is not just re-presenting the world or documenting it, but rather is now one who creates his/her own world and fills it with stories.
RENÉ DANIËLS: Painting on Unknown Languages
By Sherman SamWith loosely painted imagery like a rat on a skateboard and giant bubbles floating over a rough ocean, René Daniëls could at first glance be easily dismissed as Neo-Expressionist.
Report from London
By Sherman SamWe’ve quickly reached the last days of summer, again. Unlike New York, where things gradually quiet down over the final weeks, some galleries over here seem to use the moment to put on more fanciful and creative endeavors, to give in to the pressure of letting their artists curate and to take a chance to display their own creative personalities.
Letter from LONDON: JON THOMPSON, Paintings from The Toronto Cycle
By Sherman SamIn another age and another country, Jon Thompson could have been mistaken for either a pattern painter or an Op artist. He is in fact neither, though the appearance of his current work would surely attract fans of both those approaches.
Letter from London
By Sherman SamVarda Caivano at Chisenhale Gallery and Sam Basu at Kate Macgarry
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamThere is no doubt that Phyllida Barlow is a sculptor. That is one who makes objects in the round, and is concerned with the shaping of space and the tactility of materials.
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamThe idea of landscape today seems simple, an offering of nature to the trapped urbanite. Given our increasingly mediated lives and the fragile state of the planet, the need to be reminded of the natural world seems all the more pressing.
Report from London
By Sherman SamEach day seems to find more curators bemoaning the ability of commercial galleries, with less bureaucracy and more financial clout, to create strong shows with speed and efficiency. The frieze art fair proves and disproves just this.
Report from London
By Sherman SamObstinacy and intensity seem to be the month’s theme. In modern times, we seem to have had a greater separation between the amateur and professional, Sunday painter and schooled artist. The appearance of the modern artist also seems to coincide with the discovery of the outsider. Be it Picasso’s interest in Le Douanier Rousseau or Ben Nicholson’s love of Alfred Wallis, it is as if the primal understanding of composition and storytelling, and unbridled intensity of application provides a salve to the intellectual revolutions and reductions of the modern thinker.
Letter From London
By Sherman SamDepending on your point of view, the fall ended either with a bang or a whimper. It seems that few parts of the world have been spared the financial tidal wave of recent months, yet in all the hubbub, there was one ray of complete absurdity.
Letter From LONDON
By Sherman SamJust an hour outside London, the Milton Keynes Gallery is collaborating in a new Hayward Touring venture that could provide a quiet revolution of its own: a trilogy of curatorial opens intended to support young UK-based curators. This first one, Quiet Revolution, curated by Chris Fite-Wassilak, is a show of witty and instinctive assemblages and sculptures made from found objects.
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamThomas Hirschhorn’s shows tend to create a stir. His Musée Précaire (precious museum) in Paris housed masterpieces from the Pompidou Centre in a cardboard building out in the working class suburbs,
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamIt’s October again. Fall has finally arrived and so has the Frieze magazine crew with the 5th edition of its art fair road show
Seeing in a Different Light: A Profile of Ralph Rugoff
By Sherman SamIf you strolled onto the grounds of the Southbank Centre over the summer, you’d catch a flag by Tracy Emin emblazoned with “One secret is to save everything” printed over a field of swimming sperm.
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamThe Frieze team has really reshaped the British art world’s calendar. Along with gearing up into social overdrive, the scene benefits from the efforts of museums large and small to capitalize on the moment and put on first-rate exhibitions.
Report from London
By Sherman SamAlthough they run their programs throughout the summer, London galleries don’t really turn up the heat until around the third week of September, in anticipation of Frieze, the most “fashionable” art fair in the world (October 12–15: friezeartfair.com).
Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamKenneth Martin (1905-84) and his wife Mary Martin (1907-69) were English Constructivist artists of the Fifties, but to restrict the scope and influence of their work to this period would be a mistake.
Letter from London
By Sherman SamWhen Jens Hoffman was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, a distinctive trait of his shows was their immaculate presentation and highly creative approaches to presentation. From the painted walls to the little exhibition guides and atmospheric changes from room to room, each of Hoffman’s efforts raised the bar on exhibition design, perhaps a holdover from his non-art background of theatre direction.
SINGAPORE BIENNALE 2011: Open House
By Sherman SamQuite unlike the Whitney Biennial, the Tate Triennial, or the British Art show (a quinquennale), which are summations of a moment in a specific place, most biennials—Venice aside—are dialogues or contrasts between the local and the international.
Letter From PORTO
By Sherman SamHow to make an image but still construct a painting is the question that John Wilkins has repeatedly tried to solve over the years. Unless you’re familiar with London painting at the end of the last century, it is unlikely that you know Wilkins’s work.
Letter from London
By Sherman SamThe discovery of Le Douanier Rousseau by Picasso in Paris, and the naïve fisherman-artist Alfred Wallis by the British modernist Ben Nicholson in Cornwall, provided inspiration for new approaches to making art. What opened their eyes was a freedom of material, expression, and mostly of composition that worked purely within the terms of the frame.
Andrew Bick and Charlotte Beaudry
By Sherman Samn our current art-fair-crazy moment, it is quite difficult to imagine a situation of antagonistic ideologies such as that posed by the Jewish Museum’s Action/Abstraction exhibition.
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Letter from LONDON
By Sherman SamDespite the fact that we’re now nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, there is still much to be said about doing things the old-fashioned way.
Letter from London
By Sherman SamSeveral years ago Jerry Saltz argued against the New York art world’s status quo by calling for small groups of artists, curators and supporters to counter “supply-and-demand thinking” with a “production-and-experience thinking.” The argument being to create a culture in which many voices were heard rather than being dictated to by the singular drone of the market.
FRANCIS ALŸS A Story of Deception
By Sherman Sam“Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic,” reads the wall alongside Francis Alÿs’s video, “The Green Line” (2004).
Unpopular Culture
By Sherman SamIn stark contrast to Claydon’s efforts, the ceramicist Grayson Perry has worked with England’s Arts Council to curate an exhibition drawn from their collection.
