Sheila Isham

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© Copy right 1992-2006 Walter Wickiser Gallery, Inc. All rights reserved. This site is designed and maintained by Lucy Chen.

Sheila Isham				Gallery II			Mar 3 - Mar 28, 2007

Images	I	Resume	I	Catalogue Essay	I	Purchase Painting or Catalogue
	Oasis Series: Sheila Isham Sheila Isham is an American artist working primarily in an abstract style. Since the early 1960's she has moved in one direction, towards pure abstraction, and then in reverse, towards figurative depiction. But her movements in both directions had definite limits. Moving all the way to the straightforward and direct depiction of the animal cosmos, she is least of all naturalistic (although in depicting certain beasts and birds she achieves the quality of a master of old-fashioned animalist art). For Isham, too, the human and animal worlds are one, and it is this wise community of beasts, humans, birds, reptiles and plants - a community not mediated by cultural codes - that inhabits her canvases. Isham achieves this mediating effect through the painterly realization of the lifecycle itself. Images appear from within a kind of color and energy lava that seems to form them. In the very making of these images, we have a certain geological and zoological sense of something being ‘in process,' of a lack of finality. This lava forms the image, but it can also dissolve it. The lava of form creation, which expels the image onto the surface, continues to move somewhere in the depths, promising new metamorphoses. This is only a brief halt on the path of evolution. It is with reason that these series all share one word in their title, Oasis. As an artist, Isham is marked by an incredible restlessness. Even the calm of an ‘oasis' created by her own hand, as we have sought to demonstrate, is only relative. She continually explores new paths and returns to the old. Few artists - including Isham, I expect - can say precisely what they are seeking. Having mastered the art of return, Sheila Isham knows to whom it is that she returns - to herself. Truly a rare gift in contemporary art. Alexander Borovsky Alexander Borovsky is the head curator of Contemporary Art at the Russian State Museum, and an international art critic and historian.