DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Claire Sherman’s exhibition of new paintings, Intuor, on view May 5 through June 18, 2022. 

Building on her 2019 exhibition at the gallery, which was inspired by Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction, here, Sherman continues to examine the new state of our environment caused by globalism and increases in worldwide trade and travel. Due to human intervention, invasive species and plants have been forced into a new coexistence, creating what is said to be a new supercontinent. 

The title of the exhibition is drawn from the Latin word intuor, meaning to look, to consider or to stare. The dense, tangled, and undulating forms of spaces and plants in the paintings address some of the complicated new environments that the human species is creating. Without reference to specific locations, Sherman’s paintings are simultaneously straightforward, concise, and analytic in their representation of a single piece of ground. The intensity and scale of these paintings causes close examination on the part of the viewer. In a moment that has forced many of us to be distant from each other, the proximity of the familiar environment depicted in these paintings is deliberate.

Having spent the last eight years researching and hiking locations in Northern California and Oregon, many of which were consumed by forest fires in 2020 and 2021, Sherman returns often to the subject of wildflowers, one of the first plants to return after the destruction of a fire. The resilience of wildflowers, existing both in forests and next to highways, feels urgent during our current time of pandemic and climate change.