Niki Sherey | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Niki Sherey combines acrylic paint and photographic collages to create “altered landscapes”. The artist integrates a printed photograph into each of her pieces, creating compositions that are structured according to colour and form. Whilst a photograph captures a real, fixed moment in time, the bright and bold use of paint goes beyond the moment and expresses the transcendence of these landscapes, which seem to extend infinitely, due to the immensity of their expanse. \n Fascinated by the lines of the horizon, the artist, who grew up in the arid and rocky state of Texas, explores the point where the earth and sky meet in her reconstructed landscapes. With her astute attention to detail, she steals the most elusive moments: sunsets, sunrises, coloured skies, and meticulously gathers together all these moments that somehow escape us. Niki Sherey then reinterprets them, breaks them down and reinvents them with an emotional touch.\n When she later moved to Seattle, the artist began to pictorially familiarise herself with a climate that experiences the change of the seasons, the falling of leaves and the blossoming of buds, the colours that are given life and then fade. By photographing scenery with lakes and waterfalls in large national parks, she introduces a liquid element to her paintings, all the while training her focus on the evanescence of impression. Documented reality and sensory memory can be found purposely woven together in her work.\n The reflections in the lakes, endless open spaces, choppy mountainous horizons and sea views – all these effects that nature produces – find their way under the paintbrush of the artist and become points for development of the photographs that create delicate decoration of an internal world from the light and mirror phenomena.