Claire Sherman: New Pangea

This catalogue situates Claire Sherman’s monumental landscape paintings within contemporary discourse surrounding ecological crisis and environmental transformation, particularly through the lens of Elizabeth Kolbert’s conceptualization of “New Pangaea”—a biospheric reconfiguration precipitated by globalization’s unprecedented redistribution of flora and fauna. Through curator Melissa Messina’s analysis, Sherman’s practice emerges as a sophisticated meditation on the Anthropocene’s destabilization of traditional landscape representation, one in which deliberately distorted chromatic relationships and gestural immediacy coalesce to produce what might be termed a new sublime. Drawing upon extensive research, including sustained engagement with affected landscapes through photography and direct observation, Sherman’s paintings articulate a complex dialectic between representational specificity and imaginative transformation, expanding the possibilities of contemporary landscape painting while offering crucial insight into how artistic practice might meaningfully engage with the unprecedented environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

Published by DC Moore Gallery, 2019

Essay by Melissa Messina

Designed by Joseph Guglietti

Edited by SNAP Editions

Fully illustrated, 40 pages

_{Cover Image © Claire Sherman}