PRESS RELEASE
Yves Scherer
Sunshine
December 27, 2023 to March 24, 2024
Opening on Wednesday December 27, 2-7:30p.m.
theStable, Bügl Suot 60, 7525 S-chanf
The Stable is pleased to present Sunshine, the first solo exhibition in the Engadin of the New York based, Swiss born artist Yves Scherer (b.1987).
In his artistic practice, Scherer adroitly straddles the nexus of Pop art with a technologically inflected neo-classicism. The show of multi-media works installed over 2 floors consists of new oil paintings that present natural forms such as flowers and trees, whimsical marble sculptures of a puppy with a bird on its head, a snowman, and, an on-going series of lenticular prints that are well known for their appropriations of media personalities. Overlaying 3D manipulated images of famous personae such as Kate Moss (scanned from a book in black and white, then colored with the help or artificial intelligence) with floral motifs from personal photographs, these works in the first room create the meta-narrative of the exhibition, which finds further emphasis and it’s real world counterpart with an array of unique ceramic sunflowers hand made in his New York studio that span the barn space of the upper floor of the gallery, and act as the installation environment to the sculptures.
His work is like a multi-faceted fan zine that hooks onto the mainstream obsession with celebrity and hero worship but merged with autobiography and fictional memories. The American, née Hollywood dream factory gets filtered through the virtual screen, from the magazine rack, and published media. Scherer exploits the collective emotional attachments to these elusive muses often spied upon on the Internet and social media. With cool detachment he agglomerates the vast treasure trove of recycled images passed along from one format to another through conceptually rigorous “placebos”; i.e. faux-naif sculptures on the other side of Pop, larger than life fashion/lifestyle oriented photographic lenticular images, and the natural material of clay. This pleasing architectonic spatial construct of the male gaze with youthful fantasy makes for a convergence of the public and the private domain within the real time framework of exhibition making.
As a respite from the daily grind of mind numbing spectacle, Sunshine then, is a refuge where Scherer draws you into a tangibly idealized world of beauty, nature, and the purity of childhood innocence with well-calibrated artificial structures. In seductive fashion, his desire to reinvigorate empty cultural signifiers with meaning is an affirmation of life itself in restoring dignity and composure to a flawed world. (Max Henry)
Yves Scherer was born in 1987 in Solothurn, CH, and lives and works in New York, NY, US. He holds an MA in Sculpture from The Royal College of Art, London, UK, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Swiss Institute, New York, NY, US (2015); Kunstverein Wiesen, Wiesen, DE (2019); and, at Kunsthaus Grenchen, Grenchen, CH (2020). Other institutional presentations include the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK; Futura, Prague, CZ; Grand Palais, Paris, FR; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH; and Basement Roma, Rome, IT. In 2015, Scherer was the recipient of a Swiss Art Award.