Sherwin Ovid works in painting and multiple mediums to create visual works that explore the interface between the built and natural world. He investigates different approaches to spatial organization using a combination of handmade and digitally collaged forms.
Sherwin Ovid works in painting and multiple mediums to create visual works that explore the interface between the built and natural world. He investigates different approaches to spatial organization using a combination of handmade and digitally collaged forms. Pigment, resin, bubbles, and dirt are some of the variety of materials that he accumulates on the surface while constructing the spatial environment of the work. These materials hold actual significance and illuminate conceptual ideas of fluid dynamics, migration, hybridity and visibility.
Partial glimpses of the pictorial are situated within an array of flat and modeled compositional elements and are often enveloped by formal systems of abstraction. Ovid often makes use of the language of rational geometric diagrams that are upended with improvisational gestures made via slow-drying liquid mediums, producing cascading layers that act contentiously to the rigid structures. Mixtures of contrasting iridescent color create their own vortexes, and undulating waves of recurring visual patterns serve to catapult the viewer through different registers of visual scales.
Born in Trinidad, Sherwin Ovid lives and workws in Chicago. He received his BFA from the School Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and a Master’s of Fine Art in 2014 from the University of Illinois at Chicago where he received a Lincoln Fellowship in 2013.
