Amy Sherald: The Heart of the Matter...
Hauser & Wirth, New York City, through Oct. 26
“Amy Sherald doesn’t take requests, with one exception,” said Kelly Crow in The Wall Street Journal. When she agreed to create a life-size image of Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery, the painting she delivered transformed the then 44-year-old from respected art-world midlister to international celebrity. The work isn’t a typical official portrait of a first lady: It shows a seated Obama with chin in hand and wearing a billowing white dress adorned with geometric patterns. But it is typical for Sherald because its AfricanAmerican subject directly engages our gaze and the figure’s skin has been rendered in graytone, creating a sharp contrast with the color-saturated backdrop. Sherald has since embraced that painting’s scale, and in the eight canvases featured in her first major New York City gallery show, all her figures are now life-size or larger.
Sherald is usually most interested in ordinary lives, said Hilarie Sheets in Cultured Mag.com. During her early career in Baltimore, she worked “in the stylistic vein of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth.” Then, in 2008, a chance encounter with a tall, striking black woman in a polkadot dress inspired Well Prepared and Maladjusted, a portrait that “set the tone for how Sherald continues to work today.” She often spots potential subjects on the subway or the street and asks to take a photo, which she then uses as a guide. Some of the new paintings refer