Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Amy Sherald’s Absorbing, Oil Portraits

Amy Sherald’s oil paintings are arresting portraits, absorbing in their choices of palette and mood. Within her works’ titles, we’re given further insight into the personalities of these figures, like “What's Precious Inside Of Him Does Not Care To Be Known By The Mind In Ways That Diminish Its Presence (All American)” and “Try On Dreams Until I Find The One That Fits Me. They All Fit Me.” Yet, these works stand alone as engrossing, vibrant odes to individualism. For a recent show at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, the venue said that the artist creates “imagined figures based on real-life interactions, subverting and exploring notions of black identity through her unique sense of visual culture, color and line.”

Amy Sherald’s oil paintings are arresting portraits, absorbing in their choices of palette and mood. Within her works’ titles, we’re given further insight into the personalities of these figures, like “What’s Precious Inside Of Him Does Not Care To Be Known By The Mind In Ways That Diminish Its Presence (All American)” and “Try On Dreams Until I Find The One That Fits Me. They All Fit Me.” Yet, these works stand alone as engrossing, vibrant odes to individualism. For a recent show at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, the venue said that the artist creates “imagined figures based on real-life interactions, subverting and exploring notions of black identity through her unique sense of visual culture, color and line.”

“My work began as an exploration to exclude the idea of color as race from my paintings by removing ‘color’ but still portraying racialized bodies as objects to be viewed through portraiture,” the artist says, in a past statement. “These paintings originated as a creation of a fairytale, illustrating an alternate existence in response to a dominant narrative of black history.”

Sherald is a graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and Clark-Atlanta University in Atlanta. Since graduating, she’s had exhibits in New York, Chicago, and other spots across the U.S.


Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
The wild oil paintings of Kit Mizeres return in a new show at Arch Enemy Arts. "Farewell Transmission" explores the concept of solitude, with new works packed with mythological symbols and inspiration from the artist’s travels. Mizeres was last mentioned on HiFructose.com here.
Michael Reeder's sold-out show "mOMENt" comes to a close this weekend at Thinkspace Gallery in Culver City, Calif. The artist's multilayered graphic works use oils, acrylics, spraypaint, and other materials for striking portraits. The artist was featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 44, and he was last mentioned on the Hi-Fructose blog here.
Alongside Jeff Soto's "Nightgardens" (covered here), Sashie Masakatsu made his debut solo exhibition at KP Projects/MKG in Los Angeles last weekend with "Blind Box." We featured Masakatsu's disaster striken world in HF Vol. 28, where there is no sign of life except for his strange, hovering orbs. As his title suggests, whatever propels them remains a mystery, but their exteriors have evolved to incorporate newly decorative motifs.
New York City-based artist Daniel Bilodeau creates work that blends traditional still-life and figure studies with postmodern, existential displacement. These are works that feel as though once complete, were re-arranged by the hands of another creator. There are traces of traditional Dutch still-life in Bilodeau’s works, but there’s also a contemporary, graphical quality to the work, which in its dissonance, offers physical and psychological complexity.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List