Breakthrough
Amy Sherald at Hauser & Wirth, NYC
Amy Sherald has had a pretty eventful year. After Michelle Obama chose the artist to paint her portrait, Sherald has had non-stop press (most all of which was overwhelmingly positive), and Hauser & Wirth quickly announced that they would be representing her. Finally, her first major show with the behemoth gallery has opened in New York, and wonderfully, the exhibition lives up to all the hype and anticipation.
Entitled the heart of the matter…, Sherald’s exhibition is relatively spare and elegant. Although she was given a cavernous space to work with, each painting is given plenty of room to breathe while permeating viewers to maximum effect. Portraiture is Sherald’s bread and butter, but she is possibly at her most confident and skilled with her subjects in this new body of work.
Sherald’s show continues her long-running exploration into contemporary black American identity. Always frontal, painted in front of plain backdrops of vivid color, Sherald’s subjects are rendered in beautiful detail. Skin is painted in the classical method of grisaille. With tones of neutral grey, Sherald’s figures are at once black and not black. In art history, the black body was rarely depicted, but photography in the nineteenth century finally began to record the lives of black Americans. By painting in grisaille, Sherald subverts art history and makes a nod to these early documents of black Americans.
Along with her depictions of flesh, Sherald’s portraits have consistent style choices. Every single subject has steady posture, lovely clothing, and dignified expressions. Like fellow Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley, Sherald inserts a myriad of art historical references into every canvas to course correct the whitewashed history of art. However, where Wiley uses the powerful images of royalty or religious figures from art’s past, Sherald’s work is subtler and quiet. Instead of raucous celebration, Sherald presents a vision that is serene, quiet, even romantic.
