
Adam Sher
"The City Spots series was concieved by Sher while living in New York, inspired by the everyday life of this metropolitan. The series presents the outcome of wondering around a big city, and visual conclusions of observation in an urban setting. Sher gives into this wandering and the surprises that it brings along the way, and by doing so answers the adventurous impulse known to us from the backpackers' trips in the wild. But Sher doesn't need to travel far. He finds it sufficient just walking around a busy street and admiring the scene, which evokes in him a need to document and map out the urban "landscape."
Accordingly, the works Sher chose to present are very personal, marking his own city limits and its subjective qualities. like a connecting channel that reunites man and nature. However, Sher's surprising definition of nature, of the landscape, has been updated here to encompass the relationship between man and the mother city. In these urban portraits, the face of the city has taken the place of the man's face. The human characters have been replaced by billboards with torn apart posters, refrigerators bursting with produce, shopping windows and neon lights, which tell the story of man and city.
Sher's grasp of the urban reality disregards the squalor, filth and the mental fatigue that accompanies it, and makes room for a "new aesthetics" according to Sher, an aesthetics deserving of an artistic angle. Within the eclectic content hidden in the city's streets, Sher finds a formal logic and magnifies it while using color and texture laden with pathos. Even the precision of Sher's artistic language, which is based on structural divisions of the frame (first in photography and then is painting), helps to capture the environment depicted in the paintings as an urban, street-like icon.
This polished adaptation of his to the so called trivial landscape, one that doesn't occupy us in daily life, is the source of Sher's sensitivity.It's as if his art asks us to show more empathy towards our surroundings, enjoy in the scenery coming at us from every corner, and embrace them."
Writen by Yael Omer, from the text for the exhibition 'City Spots'
Provenance
A gift from the artist