Sherrie Wolf
Portland painter, Sherrie Wolf has long been inspired by still life and historical European and American paintings. Her images openly play with art as artifice incorporating 19th-century trompe l’oeil tradition, and strong elements of both naturalism and surrealism. Her compelling technique of arranging still lifes in front of excerpts from old master paintings connects her to a history of reinterpretation and artistic borrowing. For this exhibition, Wolf explores further combinations of her sumptuous renditions of fruit and flora with figurative painting. Elements begin to interact: the still life foliage playfully obscuring the narrative of the figurative, the figurative peeping through, creating a dialogue that is titillating and erotic. It is in this exchange, as the viewer turns into voyeur, that the artist discovers, through experimentation of juxtaposition and camouflage, the work’s narrative resonance.
Sherrie Wolf graduated from the Museum Art School, now the Pacific Northwest College of Art, in 1974 and received an MA from the Chelsea College of Art in London, England in 1975. A well-collected artist, she began exhibiting her work in the mid 1970s, a time when she also taught art at PNCA. Her work has been included in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Awards include a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council in 2002 and Oregon State University in 2001. 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; City of Seattle; Washington State Art Collection; and Southern Oregon State College, Ashland. Sherrie has been featured on Oregon Art Beat and has been written about by numerous publications including American Artist Magazine, Southwest Art Magazine, and New American Painting. One of her paintings is featured on the cover of Away, the acclaimed new novel by Amy Bloom.