New York Minute: Yves Scherer

We are delighted to present Swiss artist Yves Scherer's fourth exhibition at Golsa. The show encompasses Scherer's latest paintings, sculptures, and lenticular pieces, showcasing the artist's remarkable versatility of expression. Entitled "New York Minute," the show sets the scene for a galaxy of characters, locations, and emotional impulses that all, whether in tandem or individually, orbit around a single backdrop, a sliver of a moment in the city. The New York minute before us is no shorter than its idiomatic usage would suggest; it is a snapshot of a morning in the city.

Departing to a degree from his fascination with celebrity culture, and inspired in part by the artist's life in New York City, Scherer's latest work ushers in a romantic vision of a setting and the characters residing in it, exploring the emotional aspects of how they relate to each other and their environment, before the day ahead of them develops into a dizzying vortex. There is immediacy in the setting; it is personal. The locality feels essential here - the moment could have been anywhere else, but it matters that it is set in New York.

Intensely focused on capturing the incremental and elemental quality of existence in his works, Scherer masterfully extends the power that a small moment can hold, no matter how elusive, moving fluidly through various modes of visual language and expression. Through his art, Yves Scherer explores the power of focusing on minute parts of human experience and the profound impact these tiny moments can have on our lives.

Seemingly fascinated with exploring the dualities of existence, Scherer's work has long been centered around opposing ideas and perceived opposites. Juxtaposing the public and the most intimate, celebrity figures often loom over or duet with the moments of private reverie in his works. And yet, in "New York Minute," the artist is fascinated with a different interplay altogether — he is concerned with revealing the shifting nature of our perception of time and place and how relational our perception of both concepts are. At the center of this interplay, there are, for the artist, always two figures caught in a romantic pas de deux. 

Enter Rainy Day in New York (2023), a patinated bronze sculpture of a life-size girl and a tiny wing-adorned boy. Perched up on the girl's head like an ornament, the butterfly boy has his gaze fixed on the horizon. The girl, with her head bowed ever so slightly, seemingly looking down, is in mid-motion, as if frozen in movement, stepping forward. Draped in a long garment that emphasizes her action, she is daydreaming or set on a particularly captivating point of interest. Her predicament leaves her unmoved by the presence of the boy, her quiet confidant, and unaffected by our gaze. Before us is a moment of saunter, of childlike thirst for exploration - like a gender-bent Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, the girl and the boy are at the center of a fleeting moment, moving in unison. 

Scherer revisits the symbiotic relationship between two characters in the sculpture New York Minute (2023). In a reflection on duality, these characters are simultaneously placed in contrast and portrayed in a particular sort of unison. Departing from the realism he often employs in his sculptural works, Scherer shapes this dog and this bird as abstract forms of their natural counterparts, rendering them one entity. The permanence of the chosen material — bronze, further seals their relationship, creating a sense of solidity and perpetuity that contrasts the fleeting nature of the moment captured by the exhibition. Both of these couples seem to be a new mode in which Scherer continues to explore relationships, personal and public, relationships of his characters with each other, with the setting in which they are placed, and with the public. 

Several large and medium-format paintings populate the space around the sculptures. Most often featuring an image of the moon seen through a window, Scherer highlights a sense of consistency in their composition, with structure given by nine window panes. The works balance a formal reminiscence to the systems of abstract painters such as Stanley Whitney or Sean Scully with "representation" paintings of the moon or the view through the window, which has been a recurring trope through the centuries - from Pierre Bonnard to Anne Craven. 

In his paintings, Yves Scherer explores the intimacy of a moment caught in time. He elaborates on these beats through visual multiplicity, rich color, and vigorous brushstrokes, reflecting on childhood, new beginnings, and the vibrancy of blossoming life. Painting the scenes in various shades of a single color - orange in most cases, peppered with blue, green, and yellow outliers, Scherer highlights the reflective properties of his expression, a focus on the deep exploration of a singular moment, a calming exercise. What Scherer invites us to experience here is not a seriality that explores the combination of colors around a specific subject, as we can find in Albers' exploration of the square, but a particular color scheme that the artist varies only very slightly within hue, tone, and shade in each work.

Finally, the exhibition features a new lenticular work - Stuyvesant Square (2023). Lenticular works allow Yves Scherer to explore divergent realities – those of fame and celebrity juxtaposed with intimate, private moments that signal emotional, even romantic connections. A unique feature that comes into play with these works is that our movement around them triggers a new perspective in incremental ways – the subtle shifts and changes of light create a sense of direction and depth. Thus, these pieces are compelling in their ability to capture the fleeting, ephemeral quality of human experience, reminding us of how our lives are shaped by our very surroundings, as well as subtle shifts in interactions and moments that we often take for granted. 

Much has been said about the artistic method of appropriation. In this case, Scherer appropriates an existing celebrity image to trigger a sense of familiarity in the viewer. The result is a call for an association that is outside the scope of our active recognition. We may not always know the names of celebrities whose faces Scherer chooses to feature in his works. After all, it is not the artist's ultimate goal that we do. It is precisely at the border of thinking and sensing that Scherer's work draws the most impact, highlighting the effect our exposure to the world of celebrity and spectacle has on our lives. Emphasizing the unique relationship between our innermost worlds and the public lives we all share, Yves Scherer employs a medium that reveals these relations' transient and ambivalent nature, presenting an iconography of symbols that coexist and repel each other at the same time.

-

Yves Scherer (b.1987) is a Swiss artist based in New York City. Scherer's practice is centered around combining personal narratives with fan fiction to explore the relationship between the private and the public. Working with various media - from sculpture, photography, and painting to installations and collages containing everything from paparazzi images to tatami mats, Scherer creates immersive environments that offer the viewer an often romantic lens or perspective on the self, relationships and the everyday.

Scherer holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art London. His work has been shown internationally in galleries and institutions such as the ICA London, Villa Merkel Esslingen, Kunsthalle Basel, Eva Presenhuber, and the Swiss Institute in New York and Kunsthaus Grenchen. He is the recipient of a Förderpreis Bildende Kunst des Kanton Solothurn 2012, Swiss Art Award in 2015 and was listed on Forbes 30 under 30 “Art & Design” in the class of 2016.