‘Paula Scher: U.S.A.’
The map paintings of Paula Scher are exhibited at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York City.
Pentagram is pleased to announce that Paula Scher’s acclaimed map paintings will be presented in a new exhibition, Paula Scher: U.S.A., opening tonight at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York. For this exhibition, Scher has created 10 new cartographic paintings and prints focusing on the United States. Each map views the country through a different set of data, such as population demographics, transportation flows, geography, and climate.
In her paintings, Scher renders information and data culled from headlines, maps and diagrams in torrents of hand-drawn typography. Obsessive, opinionated and more than a little personal, the maps provide an exuberant portrait of contemporary information in all its complexity and subjectivity. In the new show, the works depict the U.S. swirling in patterns of information, layered with hand-painted boundary lines, place names and commentary. The paintings and prints have straightforward titles like “U.S. Area Codes and Time Zones,” “U.S. Driving Times and Mileage,” and “U.S. Geography and Climate,” but the information can in no way be interpreted as literal fact. In fact, some of it may be quite inaccurate—Scher calls her style “abstract-expressionist information”—and the paintings celebrate a personalized understanding of the diversity of the country.
“It’s an election year, and I am fascinated by the ways different parts of the country think, and looking at demographics and geography in the U.S. and making connections,” Scher recently told Slate.
Join us for tonight’s opening at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery from 6 to 8 pm. The gallery is located at 505 West 24th Street, New York City, adjacent to the High Line. The show remains on view through March 26.
This is Scher's second solo exhibition with the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, where she previously showed her paintings in 2012. Her earlier maps are collected in the monograph Paula Scher: MAPS, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2011.
Additional coverage: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, Wallpaper, Phaidon, Hyperallergic.
