Blue Monsoon
David Benjamin Sherry
February 15 - 29, 2024
Footfalls Echo in the Moonlight, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
56 x 70 in (142.2 x 177.8 cm)
COUNTY is pleased to present Blue Monsoon by the New Mexico-based artist David Benjamin Sherry. This is Sherry’s first solo exhibition at COUNTY.
In a suite of paintings that span the colors of the visible spectrum, opposites fuse and binaries are transcended. The earth, the cosmos, and the human body merge into radiant, energistic forms that are sensual but not specifically gendered. Curves, orbs, soft edges, and openings suggest the porous nature of bodies at a microscopic level or landscapes softened by wind, heat, and monsoon rains. Echoing the biomorphic abstractions of early desert modernists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Transcendentalist painters Florence Miller and Agnes Pelton, Sherry’s paintings are the culmination of his ongoing, seventeen-year project of bringing a uniquely mystical, queer sensibility to the landscape traditions of the American West.
After the passing of his closest friend in 2007, Sherry took a road trip to Death Valley, where he made his first landscape photographs while meditating on life and death in the expanded time horizon of the valley’s ancient geology. Back in the studio, experimenting with a color enlarger, he printed these photographs as ultra-saturated monochrome images to evoke the strong emotions he had felt during his journey. The colors, he said, were also influenced by the rainbow palette of experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger and ideas of “queer magick” not traditionally associated with the heroism and hubris of the Western landscape tradition.
“For me, what magick is—personal, queer, mystic magick—is creating the space for my body, my soul, and my mind to come together in one thing. And that one thing is the artwork.”
Sherry eventually moved to New Mexico, where his practice expanded to include photograms and paintings. Because painting is not constrained by verisimilitude, it allows him to express his relationship to the landscape in terms of internal visual memories and transcendental feelings. The shapes in his Blue Monsoon paintings are not harsh and rugged, as the American West is so often represented. Rather, they are soft and receptive, opening what Sherry calls “a space of mental freedom” for himself and for the viewer. Like a long-awaited monsoon shower, the work leaves us cleansed and nourished.
David Benjamin Sherry is an internationally acclaimed artist with works in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Saatchi Collection, London, UK; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL; and The Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.
A multi-part installation of Sherry’s art was exhibited in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, New York, a survey show organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group presentations, including: The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum (2011), New York Minute at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2011), Out of Focus at Saatchi Gallery, London (2012), Lost Line, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013), What is a Photograph? at ICP International Center for Photography, New York (2014), Fotofocus Biennial, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014) Color Fields at MassArt Museum (2015) and Ansel Adams In Our Time, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018).
His work has been featured in many prominent international publications, including Artforum, Aperture Magazine, Architectural Digest, Art in America, Interview Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Times, among many others. In September 2014, his work was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In the spring of 2019, his work was featured on the cover of Aperture Magazine for the Earth issue.
Sherry received his BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007 where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010 he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Logan R. Beitmen