About the Exhibition

In March 2011, The Gallery at Windsor presented an important solo show of major paintings and works on paper by Canadian artist Tony Scherman. Entitled New Mythologies, the exhibition was curated by David Moos, then the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and featured more than 20 significant works. Moos also curated The Gallery at Windsor’s 2008 exhibit Alex Katz: Seeing, Drawing, Making.

The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with color plates and included an introductory essay by David Moos as well as excerpts by prominent critics and art historians Susan Douglas, Robert Enright, Jacques Henric and Ihor Holubizky.

Since his start in London in the early 1970’s, Toronto-based Scherman has become one of the leading figurative artists of his generation. His arresting portraits, often appearing to be cinematic close-ups, and his finely articulated still lifes draw inspiration from the grand narratives of art history. Scherman references a lineage that joins Velázquez and Goya to Manet and Lucian Freud, offering a contemporary reading of tradition. Often deriving inspiration from historical figures such as Napoleon or literary subjects such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scherman’s broad-ranging creative vision was fully explored in New Mythologies, which included works from 1995 to 2011.

About the Artist

At a time when Pop Art continued to prevail and Conceptualism was on the rise in the 1970’s, Tony Scherman chose to pursue image and figuration, working exclusively in the uncommon wax pigment encaustic technique.  His paintings and works on paper weave through the history of art and embrace image-imprints through the modern technologies of camerawork and film.  Over the past 30 years, portraiture has become a primary subject matter of his contemporary meditations encompassing villains and celebrities, bombshells and intellectuals.

Born in Toronto in 1950, Scherman spent his childhood and young adult life in Europe, including Paris and then London from 1955.  In 1974, Scherman received an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and returned to Toronto in 1976. He has had more than 100 solo exhibitions across Canada, in the United States and Europe, and in Beijing and Hong Kong.  His solo exhibition Chasing Napoleon circulated to six American university museums in 2001-2002. Scherman has been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally.

Scherman’s work is represented in 30 public collections across Canada and internationally in the Los Angeles County Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, Denver Museum of Art, San Diego Museum, High Museum Atlanta, The Birmingham Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Washington, Contemporary Arts Society London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Pompidou Centre, Paris, F.R.A.C. Ile de France and the Schlossmuseum Murnau, Germany.