While galleries, museums and art fairs have retreated into the depth of the virtual world, the artist’s studio is becoming a far more significant platform than before. As we find ourselves confined to home, we are also much closer to genuine reasoning — something that is a rare form to find during a fast-paced daily life.
A few weeks after New York State issued an order for shelter-in-place along with the closure of non-essential businesses, Monya Rowe Gallery launched a solo exhibition of 8 new paintings by Gretchen Scherer titled Love Letters that show empty museum interiors with walls covered in art. Scherer’s paintings bring to mind Frédéric Bazille’s painting of his own studio (made in 1870 and currently on view at the Musée d’Orsay) that shows six suited men socializing within an ornate blue-walled interior that is covered with what-was-then-known-as contemporary art.
Scherer’s line, however, is less refined while remaining equally vague in the details. But it is this kind of naïvete seen through the representation of grandeur that reveals the growing kaleidoscopic blur of our current contemporary art world as the memories continue to twist and fade. Scherer’s vibrantly colorful oil paintings, moreover, present museum interiors as displayed at The Frick, The Hermitage, The Wallace Collection, The Green Closet and The Louvre. Love Letters takes the viewer to exclusive rooms around the…
