VICKI SHER BIOGRAPHY
Vicki Sher (1966), an American artist from Brooklyn, has taken part in numerous international fairs and exhibitions in New York. She received her B.F.A. from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and has been making art and exhibiting throughout the United States for over two decades.
Vicki Sher frequently uses transparent drafting film. By layering it sometimes with other sheets of paper, she can create multi-layered compositions, allowing her to play with the feeling of depth and additional space while preserving the balance of her creations. She likes a lot of space in her work, and drafting film makes it possible for her to keep that space open and aerated.
“My work sits at the intersection of Form and Joy. Balance and restraint butt heads with an ecstatic appreciation of color. I make paintings and sculptures that I want to exist because I want to make beautiful things. I use color to activate emotion, shapes to reference the natural and anthropomorphic world, then I give space around the activity to invite considerations about place and narrative. My concerns are tactile, and visual, but emerge from intuitive and instinctual impulses.
Rather than draw from the discernible physical world, I use shapes that reference plants, landscapes, and the body but assert their unnaturalness. In this way, I use principles of naturalism, I.e., gravity, growth, posture, and harmony, but can depart into my own playful territory. The work also references music, in the sense that structure and shifts in color can vibrate and affect us much in the same way that shifts in rhythm and harmony/discordances play on our mood.”
Vicki Sher’s work has been featured at VOLTA Basel, NADA, and Art Paris fairs, among others. Her work has been exhibited at public institutions, including the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA, the Beatrice M. Haggerty Gallery, University of Dallas, Dallas, TX, and The Phillips Museum at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. She is a recipient of a 2014 MacDowell Colony Fellowship award and a 2015 VCCA Fellowship award.