Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on April 18, 2002 of Honoré Sharrer: Selected Paintings and Drawings. The exhibition and sale, comprised of twenty-nine oils and thirty-one drawings in casein, charcoal, and pencil, present the enigmatic and provocative images created by the contemporary artist Honoré Sharrer over the course of four decades. In her fastidiously rendered realistic images, Sharrer mixes the real and the surreal, including idiosyncratic motifs and trompe l'oeil artifice to produce works that are oriented toward the magical conditions of everyday life and that capture the unusual beauty and sensuality of ordinary experiences. The catalogue for the exhibition, including essays by Drs. Linda Nochlin and Erika Doss and twenty full-page color plates, is available from the gallery for $30 postpaid.
Born in 1920, in West Point, New York, and now living near Charlottesville, Virginia, Sharrer has been a painter for most of her life. She studied art in Paris at age fourteen, took classes while in high school with the figurative painter Wayman Adams in Elizabethtown, New York, and in 1938 enrolled at the Yale University School of Fine Arts. Anxious to paint the subjects of real life rather than art studio exercises, she left Yale after one year. Yet later she reflected that "the Yale School's extremely thorough approach to craft and composition assisted me technically in my own approach to realism." In 1939 Sharrer studied briefly at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and was the youngest artist to participate in the Golden Gate Exposition (1939-40), a national review of contemporary American painting and sculpture that included works by such realist and representational painters as Ivan Albright, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, and Charles Sheeler.

During the early 1940s, Sharrer worked at a number of jobs, including welding in the shipyards of the Bay Area and Hoboken, New Jersey, designing department store windows in New York, and creating storyboards for New York movie companies. At the same time, she continued to paint, and she was chosen to create a number of murals under the New Deal, including designs for post offices in St. Louis, Missouri, and Worcester, Massachusetts. The oil sketch for her mural, Workers and Paintings (1943), caught the eye of the art critic and patron Lincoln Kirstein, who purchased it and donated it to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1946 Kirstein included Sharrer in the museum's landmark exhibition, Fourteen Americans, which featured work by diverse artists ranging from Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell to David Hare, Loren McIver, Isamu Noguchi, Saul Steinberg, and Mark Tobey. When Sharrer had her first solo exhibition at Knoedler Gallery in New York, in 1951, she was widely heralded as an "art-world prodigy," and in the subsequent two decades, she was represented in numerous important group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as in solo exhibitions at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. Since, Sharrer has continued to paint and show her works, garnering the attention of art scholars and critics alike for her imaginative, witty, and richly layered art. She has been recognized recently with two high honors. In 1987 she received an award for outstanding achievement from the National Women's Caucus for Art, and in 2000 she was given an Academy Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

Vibrant and impeccably crafted, A Dream of Monticello (1996) is typical of Sharrer's recent paintings and drawings. Situated amid a bright, corn-yellow field and placed against a backdrop of a robin's-egg-blue sky is a surreal stage set outfitted with two towering dark-blue obelisks and including three figures, among them a redheaded Thomas Jefferson, who gazes somewhat uneasily outside of the scene. Overhead looms a huge clock set at some indeterminate time, with a long orb-like pendulum swinging back and forth between Jefferson and a blond female nude. At first glance, Sharrer's precisely rendered image seems grounded in the details of a known and recognizable world, yet as its title suggests, the painting is a dreamscape, an imaginary scene constructed from visual bits and symbolic pieces that Sharrer has rearranged.

Other recent works by Sharrer display a calm and laconic theatricality such as The Play (1997) and Music for a Ballerina (1997), the latter featuring a figure in a pink tutu who stands in a stiff first position and stares hypnotically while beside her a skeleton mockingly kicks a leg and shakes a tambourine. The dancing forms of a chicken and a green chair add to the lively yet macabre quality of the "music." In a number of works, Sharrer recapitulates the themes of her earlier canvases. For example, Five Men and a Parrot (1997) echoes her Reception (1958) in its ironic commentary on social rituals; a soberly dressed cast of well-dressed men are caught unawares of either the green parrot to the side or the plump female nude overhead.

Sharrer's vast visual data bank is further enhanced by the ephemera and art she collects, from Japanese prints and Javanese puppets to eighteenth-century Spanish religious items, silverware, crockery, plates, cups, and more. Things and subjects that "attract" her eye, including ceramic pitchers, tin bowls, wooden chairs, and musical instruments, are repeated motifs in paintings such as Diana Pouring Tea (1999) and Afternoon of a Satyr (1989). Birds, skeletons, swags of drapery, and architectural fragments also appear in many of her pictures. Clearly, Sharrer loves the play of color and form: for example, the odd combination of harvest gold house-paint, salmon pink curtains, chartreuse garden hose, and magenta ball in Archer and Unliberated Woman (1987). Yet if such heightened formal qualities, and the meticulously finished surfaces of her canvases, are what initially draw us to Sharrer's paintings, it is their mysterious, playful, and tantalizingly intriguing subjects that especially hold our attention. Melding her views of the visible world with personal memories and dreams, Sharrer's finely executed paintings are strangely familiar and yet fantastic; metaphysical tributes to the "surreal dailiness" and odd magic of everyday life.