Sherry Kerlin: A Small Dog’s Secret Life as an Abstract Expressionist: New York, NY

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to announce A Small Dog’s Secret Life as an Abstract Expressionist, Sherry Kerlin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Caught in the eternal moment of emerging, Sherry Kerlin’s subjects occupy a permanent condition of almost-being. Presented though a fine diaphanous fog, a very precise degree of imprecision, they remain always evanescent, always in a state of becoming. Equally, they may be waning: having already arrived at full clarity, full visual incarnation, they may be slipping away. We may be looking at after-images. As such, either posthumous or embryonic, they contain in them the caprices of time, a commentary on life and art captive in the dimension of time.

Kerlin’s portraits begin as highly conventional static photographs, deliberately familiar and sentimental in a Hallmark way, but they undergo a process of radical transfiguration through airbrushing and overpainting that amounts to an existential questioning of their reality. A kind of radical elusiveness envelops them – infants, pets, mothers, family – where the viewer strains to fully grasp the image, to hold it still, to realize or make it become fully manifest. Kerlin is asking the viewer to complete the process of realization, inviting them ultimately to participate in the engine-room of creation. And that depends on the imagination of the viewer, what each viewer sees. Her work is therefore a kind of abstract expressionism, a phenomenological exploration, as much an inquiry into the making of art as it is a representational figuration.

In parallel with her foremost practice as an artist, Kerlin has spent decades as a professional photo retoucher and restorer working constantly with airbrushing techniques, an application that smooths and fades and merges defined edges and flaws. The forever state of fading served up by her images haunt the viewer with questions of mortality and the transience of life, all the more affecting because the images depict cherished, vulnerable, beings. The incipience of fragility adds, therefore, a layer of feeling, of emotional poignancy, to the aesthetic and metaphysical questioning. Simultaneously, though, Kerlin undercuts the sentiment with her highly intentional scathingly ironic titles, adding yet more layers – social, religious, phobic - to the multi-tiered commentary in her works. Slyly profane, mordant, satirical, the titles shake our faith in what we are seeing. They surface our dark thoughts. A little girl in a tutu flanked by a skull is titled “Death and the Ballerina.” A nubile maiden sporting a chain and cross in “Cleavage and the Cross”. An infant face next to a befogged beast’s head is “Infant Sleeping with a Monster”. A haunted young girl with a lacey head-dress is “The Inner Doubt of the First Communion”.

Kerlin’s works straddle the great questions around the confrontation between art and life, immortality and transience, art and craft, painting and photography, perception and reality, the physical and metaphysical. She has, she says, ‘spent a lot of time with philosophers, metaphysicians and psychics probing the mystery of things: reality is an illusion.”