Sam Sherman

LSS NYC

“Afterlife”

2024 April 5 to May 5

Long Story Short is pleased to present Afterlife, the debut solo show of New York-based artist Sam Sherman. Obsessively observed down to the halftone dot, Sherman’s detailed canvases rematerialize paintings stolen by the Nazis as documented in a 1947 publication by the French Government: Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre 1939-1945.

The exhibition emerged from research into Sherman’s family history. His great grandfather’s cousin Justin Thannhauser ran a German gallery of the same name, which held a number of significant shows in Europe including some of the earliest exhibitions of Van Gogh, the first retrospective of Picasso, the first Blue Rider exhibition, and Paul Klee’s first solo show. After the death of his two children, Thannhauser donated his personal collection to the Guggenheim Museum, where it is still on view today. However, during World War II, many artworks were stolen from Thannhauser and never found.

Interested in learning more about these missing works, Sherman ended up locating a photograph of one of them in the 1947 publication. Printed as a tool for the restitution of lost art, the book contains approximately 10,000 claims made by hundreds of families for stolen paintings, a tiny fraction of which include black and white photographs taken prior to the thefts. These photographs are grouped together by genre like specimens in a natural history book. Some paintings in Afterlife replicate individual pages in the publication, while others are scaled so that the paintings they depict are reproduced at original size.

Although the photographs were not intended to be more permanent than their painted subjects, the tragic circumstances of history have rendered them just that. Never being able to fully embody their subjects, the photographs always point to the loss of the original. This is especially apparent in the closeups in Afterlife, where Sherman has rendered the halftone dot patterns visible. Paradoxically, while these dots define the images, they are also tiny voids—gaps of knowledge impossible to fill in.

These millions of gaps become a stand in for all that has been lost. In the words of Roland Barthes, “Death is the eidos of the photograph.” But, by painting these photographs and thereby reembodying their subjects in oil, Sherman’s paintings offer an unlikely afterlife for the paintings they depict. They may not be whole, but they can breathe again.

Sam Sherman is an artist based in New York working in painting, printmaking, and video. His work interrogates both historical and vernacular archives to reflect on the transmission, distortion, and loss of information through history. He was artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects, Chautauqua Institution, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Sherman has exhibited at numerous venues including the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York, NY; Long Story Short, New York, NY; GHOSTMACHINE, New York, NY; the Border Project Space, Brooklyn, NY; Pompei Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany; and in the 2021 Wheaton College Biennial, Norton, MA. Sherman received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from Hunter College.