James Yarosh Fine Art Gallery proudly features painter Sheba Sharrow:
Sheba Sharrow graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. She earned several art awards, as well as 1997 and 2001 grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2000, she received grant awards from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, and the Tampa Review University of Tampa Press.
Although Sharrow painted for more than 60 years and had 37 solo exhibits, she found her real power after she was in her 60s, according to her daughter Mayda. Sharrow intended for her surreal, expressionistic work to be provocative, and her paintings often featured human forms with haunting faces. In 2002, art critic Fred Adelson wrote in the New York Times, “[Sharrow’s] emotive images possess seductively beautiful layered surfaces, while their content conveys a profound sense of soul-searching, responding with indignation at man's brutality and compassion for society's hapless victims.”
Sharrow’s paintings were featured at the 2001 New Jersey Arts annual exhibition, Crossing Boundaries, held at the Noyes Museum of Art; its catalogue commented, “Working in the tradition of Daumier and Goya, Sharrow's work deals with metaphoric images that address the human condition. Her art has a raw physicality and emotional intensity that is genuinely beautiful, even if it is addressing the violence of modern society. Her work is like a contrapuntal melody: gentle and bold, static and aggressive, smooth and textured, light and dark.”
Corporate and private collections showcase Sharrow’s works, and her paintings remain in the permanent public collections at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Jersey City Museum.
Sharrow passed away on December 15, 2006.
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