Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff (b. 1975 in Kelowna, lives in New York) Shirreff received her BFA from the University of Victoria in Visual Arts and received her MFA in sculpture from the Yale University of Art. Shirreff has had solo exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown (2021-22), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019), Kunsthalle Basel (2016), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2016), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

(2015). She took part in recent group exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (2021), Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal (2020), Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2019), KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2018), The Common Guild, Glasgow (2017), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim

Museum, New York (2015). Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. She is the past winner of the AIMIA / AGO Photography Prize (2013).

Erin Shirreff’s diverse body of work, which includes photography, video, and sculpture, is united by her interest in the ways we experience three-dimensional forms in an age in which our perception is almost invariably mediated by still and moving images. Her work explores the gap between objects and their representations, and the materials (and materiality) of image-making. Her longstanding engagement with large-scale abstract sculpture from the mid-20th century are exemplified by her work’s ongoing dialogue with Tony Smith’s Minimalist monoliths, works designed to be felt in relation to the body. Beginning in 2006, Shirreff created a series of videos with cardboard maquettes that she fashioned after single photographic views of Smith’s Die (1962), Amaryllis (1965), and other sculptures. For her first public commission, Shirreff produced Sculpture for Snow (2011), a full-scale painted aluminum version of her miniature Amaryllis. Since Sculpture for Snow only resembles Smith’s original from the angle captured in Shirreff’s source image, it is, as revealed in the round, a façade, an intentionally hollow representation of its subject.