TONY SCHERMAN BIO

b.1950

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Born in Toronto and educated at the Byam School of Painting and Drawing and the Royal College of Art, London, Tony Scherman is one of a handful of Canadian artists to have established an international following.

Scherman employs the seductive medium of encaustic with the same deftness as Jasper Johns and Brice Marden in the creation of his textual constructs. His narrative is presented through colours bled into others, lines amended and forms ‘liquified into shadow” to confuse our expectations and permit a multiplicity of readings.

Scherman works in series. He frequently engages mythological and historical subjects that are often paralleled with a current sociological perspective. Like such Anglo-American painters as Bruce McLean, Eric Fischl, David Salle and David Bates, Scherman constructs his narrative by sequentially linking together each painting to the text, creating a corpus of work where the sum of the parts is often greater than the whole.

He finds in the still-life genre, practised so effectively throughout history by Zurbaran, Chardin and Cézanne, parables to our social and technological existence, a sort of modern-day “mementi mori”. His palette of black, white, grey and pink owes much to Goya, distilled through Manet, as does his painterly handling of the encaustic medium in which he invites the viewer to share in the process of creation.