Background
Tony Scherman was vorn in 1950 in Toronto, British Columbia, Canada.
Tony received Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art in London in 1974 before returning to his home country.
Tony Scherman was vorn in 1950 in Toronto, British Columbia, Canada.
Tony received Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art in London in 1974 before returning to his home country.
The artist began working with encaustic to better understand the tradition of still life painting, as the fleshy wax imbues objects with a greater sensuality. In rich, textured layers, Scherman’s portraits explore the volatility of human experience. His “Difficult Women” series portrays feminine icons as both stoic and emotive and includes large-scale renderings of Rosa Parks, Serena Williams, Marilyn Monroe, and Margaret Thatcher.
Scherman employs the seductive medium of encaustic with the same deftness as Jasper Johns and Brice Marden in the creation of his textual constructs. His narrative is presented through colours bled into others, lines amended and forms ‘liquified into shadow” to confuse our expectations and permit a multiplicity of readings. Using encaustic, a technique in which is pigment bound in wax rather than oil, enhances the haunting yet life-like effect of his portraits.
Scherman works in series. He frequently engages mythological and historical subjects that are often paralleled with a current sociological perspective. Like such Anglo-American painters as Bruce McLean, Eric Fischl, David Salle and David Bates, Scherman constructs his narrative by sequentially linking together each painting to the text, creating a corpus of work where the sum of the parts is often greater than the whole.
He finds in the still-life genre, practiced so effectively throughout history by Zurbaran, Chardin and Cézanne, parables to our social and technological existence, a sort of modern day “mementi mori”. His palette of black, white, grey and pink owes much to Goya, distilled through Manet, as does his painterly handling of the encaustic medium in which he invites the viewer to share in the process of creation.
Scherman’s work is represented in many private and public collections, among them the Los Angeles County Museum, Denver Museum of Art, San Diego Museum, High Museum Atlanta, Library of Congress, Washington, Contemporary Arts Society London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Pompidou Centre, Paris, F.R.A.C. Ile de France, Schlossmuseum Murnau, Germany, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Tony Scherman adheres to the artistic traditions of Neo-Expressionism. While Scherman calls on historical figures and periods, he chooses to embellish his subjects with modern themes — 18th and 19th century icons and contemporary rebels are portrayed in close crops against stark backgrounds, defiantly occupying the picture plane, and often meeting the viewer’s gaze.
Quotations: “All I can tell you is that I see beauty everywhere.”
A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the artist lives and works in Toronto, Canada.