TONY SCHERMAN BIO

1950-2023

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Born in Toronto and educated at the Byam School of Painting and Drawing and the Royal College of Art, London, Tony Scherman was one of a handful of Canadian artists to have established an international following.

Scherman employed the seductive medium of encaustic with the same deftness as Jasper Johns and Brice Marden in the creation of his textual constructs. His narrative is presented through colours bled into others, lines amended and forms ‘liquified into shadow” to confuse our expectations and permit a multiplicity of readings.

Scherman worked in series. He frequently engaged mythological and historical subjects that were often paralleled with a current sociological perspective. Like such Anglo-American painters as Bruce McLean, Eric Fischl, David Salle and David Bates, Scherman constructed his narrative by sequentially linking together each painting to the text, creating a corpus of work where the sum of the parts is often greater than the whole.

He discovered in the still-life genre, practised so effectively throughout history by Zurbarán, Chardin and Cézanne, parables to our social and technological existence, a sort of modern-day “memento mori”. His palette of black, white, grey and pink owed much to Goya, distilled through Manet, as did his painterly handling of the encaustic medium in which he invites the viewer to share in the process of creation. Schermand died of cancer at the age of 72 in February 2023.