Biba Schutz, Maria Phillips, Sondra Sherman

Artist list

Maria Phillips, Biba Schutz, Sondra Sherman

The exhibition engages the works of three major women artists from the United States in a dialogue that hopefully will provide a fertile and constructive insight into three different visions and creative processes. To Noel Guyomarc’h, bringing these artists together is interesting as all of them, through different techniques and imageries, search to convey a private and almost intimate feeling : a closeness to the body, a sensibility towards home, the expression of intimate states of mind.

Trained as a graphic designer and printmaker, Biba Schutz has been a practicing, self-taught metalsmith and jeweller for more than 20 years. She is well known for combining unexpected materials with metal, and began incorporating glass into her jewelry designs in 2012. Living and working in New York City, she is attracted to the challenge of materials and processes to create work that investigates the body. Building a place of mystery, dimension, fluidity and intrigue, Schutz’s pieces are objects that engage conversation and emotions. The are designed in close relationship to the body, both physically and emotionally.

Maria Phillips creative process takes domestic spaces as its point of departure and constant focus. Systematically looking for patterns in random encounters or habitual rhythms within homes and intimal places, she strives to capture these ordinary moments through jewellery, sculpture, drawing and photography. Phillips’ pieces are not about precious stones nor precious materials. They are about looking differently, shifting perceptions of the overlooked and expendable material of daily existence.

Initially a painter, Sondra Sherman became drawn to jewelry when she recognized adornments as a medium for empathically reaching out to the social and personal self of individuals. To her, jewelry holds this wonderful power to both have personal meaning and instigate social exchange. She will be presenting pieces from three of her latest series: “Anthophobia : Fear of Flowers” (2007), “FTD” (2009), and “Rorschach Corsages” (since 2013).
Her brooches, whose silhouettes evoke traditional elaborated corsages, include shapes and forms from botanical psychopharmica, that is to say botanicals used for treating social anxiety and depression such as opium (poppy), belladonna and nicotine. By combining the two, she aims at expressing psychological states in social relations, at questioning the increasing need for medicinal treatments and the social conditions which created so much anxiety.