Sherrie Wolf
With this exhibition, entitled Faces, Sherrie Wolf takes her fascination with historic European and American paintings in a new direction. Particularly known for juxtaposing still lifes of fruit and flowers over historic paintings by European and American old masters, with Faces, Wolf tightens her focus, and concentrates solely on the faces of women, men and children found in old master paintings from the 14th through the 19th centuries. She has created a series of over 40 closely cropped ‘portraits,’ of figures excerpted from paintings by Caravaggio, El Greco, Vermeer, Goya, Ingres and many others. Painted close up, on small canvases, this collection of paintings brings a remarkable range of ages and expressive moments into intimate view. As German art historian, Gottfried Boehm has noted, “The hundred-odd square centimeters of the surface of the face are probably the most meaningful and most mutable things in the entire world.” Wolf’s exploration of this range of faces from art history is sure to captivate viewers, as well as compel them to speculations of ‘who’s who.”
Sherrie Wolf graduated from the Museum Art School, now the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR, in 1974 and received an MA from the Chelsea College of Art in London, England in 1975. She began exhibiting her work in the mid 1970s while teaching art at PNCA. In addition to regular Portland exhibitions, Wolf is also represented in San Francisco, Boston and Seattle. Her work is included in such collections as The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts, Portland Art Museum; Hallie Ford Museum, Salem, OR; the Tacoma Art Museum, WA; City of Seattle; and Washington State Art Collection. Most recently, her work has been part of the exhibition, "The Secret Language of Animals,” at the Tacoma Art Museum.