PATRON is proud to announce Tannic Waters, our second solo exhibition with Claire Sherman.

Over the past two decades, Sherman’s conceptual approach to landscape painting has drawn upon researching, extensive hiking and photographing, and the development of a painterly language that shifts in and out of representation. Her emotive, intimate renderings of the natural world, of places filtered through her own psyche, shift from traditions of land ‘captured’ to an examination of nature as artifice that informs societal and personal narratives.

In 2023, Sherman began what would be a multi-year project revisiting the writings of American writer William Faulkner, whose rich literary descriptions of both real and fictional locations constructed a vibrantly nuanced depiction of the American South in the mid-20th century. Alluding to the mired political landscape of the 2020s, as well as the artist’s own navigation of personal grief, Sherman’s work abstracts the trees, underbrush, and foliage observed in her voyage through waters of uncertainty, resisting a clear path forward.

Borrowing its name from the leaves, peat, and minerals that give the region’s languid rivers and swamps a rusty, tea-hue, the exhibition premieres a group of new paintings created following Sherman’s visit to Faulkner’s estate, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi and her subsequent visits throughout the swamplands of the South: along the coasts of Northern Florida, the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, and Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. Applying Faulkner’s construction of a place, through its shared history and present, Sherman’s paintings translate moments of landscape into spaces that slip, shift, or disintegrate. In works such as Vines (2026), the accumulation of branches and foliage appears as almost a natural barricade, alluding to Rebecca Solnit’s perception of landscape as the “battlefield of our time—not a scenery but as the space and systems we inhabit, a system our own lives depend on.”

Sherman’s Tree and Moss (2026) and Tree and Vines (2026) act as abstracted memories of her experience within the otherworldly swamps, psychological environments that are at once eerily haunting and spiritually reverent. Vines playfully ensnare tree trucks ascending from brackish waters and Spanish mosses, elegantly draped across tree branches, become veils that fragment their environs. Slipping between representation and ambiguity, Sherman’s paintings become archaeologies themselves, constructed locations that bear the strata of our own complex personal, environmental, and political histories.

CLAIRE SHERMAN (b. 1981, Oberlin, Ohio) Claire Sherman lives and works in Guttenberg, NJ. She received a BA from The University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Select solo exhibitions include: Tannic Waters (2026), PATRON, Chicago, IL; Fragments (2025), Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson, WY; Petrichor (2025), DC Moore Gallery, New York NY; Intuor (2022), DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; Here Now (2022), Kimball Art Center, Chicago, IL; Proximity (2021), PATRON, Chicago, IL; New Pangea (2019), DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; Fern Canyon (2017), KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; West Ridge (2016), DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; and Claire Sherman (2016), Mitsui Fudosan America, New York, NY.

Select group exhibitions include: Plants, Animals, and Sky (2026) CANADA Gallery, New York, NY; Solace (2026), DC Moore Gallery, New York, a person chosen, named, or honored… (2026), PATRON, Chicago, IL; Night (2026), DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni (2025), SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, IL; Understory (2024), Pamela Salibury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Intimate Landscapes (2024), The Orange Advisory, Minneapolis, MN; Who is There? (2024), DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; Intervals (2024), Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO; Come a Little Closer (2023), DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; Reflect, Reframe, Remake, Remodel – 40 Years of Recrafting KMAC (2021), KMAC Museum of Art , Louisville, KY; Landscape and Memory (2021), Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Root + Branch (2020), Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO; The Bottomlessness of a Pond: Transcendentalism, Nature, and Spirit (2020), Sun Valley Museum of Art, Ketchum, ID; Happy Agitation (2020), Able Baker Contemporary, Portland, ME; Certain Women (2019), Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, Houston, TX; Arboreal (2019); Moss Art Center, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA; and American Genre: Contemporary Painting (2017), Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME.

Her work is included in several public and private collections including the American Association of Medical Colleges; Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State; The Federal Reserve; Arkansas Museum of Art, Little Rock, AR; BMO Harris Bank, Chicago, IL; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY, The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; UBS Art Collections in London and the United States; and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA.

CLAIRE SHERMAN
Tannic Waters

Opening reception
Thursday, September 10, 2026
5:00 – 7:30 PM
PATRON
1612 Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL

Tannic Waters is on view through October 31, 2026

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Tags: Chicago, Claire Sherman, PATRON GALLERY, Tannic Waters