Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney, a gift from the artist

Dedicated by the artist on card attached verso:

Dear Gene and Brian,
Very best wishes on your new enterprise:
The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. We hope its a great success.
This little work is to celebrate new beginnings!
With love and best wishes from us all,
Imants, Jennifer, Isidore and Saskia

Foreword

Humankind has sought to make sense of the world in one way or another throughout history.
The creation of mythologies & belief systems, our trust in ideologies and the development of philosophical frameworks – all testify to the ongoing need to create a semblance of order out of the
arbitrariness of daily reality.
For me personally, building contemporary art- and object-based collections helps to frame my internal world, encouraging me to make sense of the external realities that impact my lived experience.
From early childhood my life has been underpinned by reading. Through thick and thin, books have been my happy place. Later, the pleasure of engaging in targeted research, combined with an instinctive inclination to document, record and archive – honed & amplified my favourite activity.
With hindsight, I have come to understand the importance of the visual in every aspect of my life: my home environment across continents, (from the most humble to the relatively grand), my choice of clothes, my experimentation with hairstyles, the art viewed during the course of decades in museums,
biennales and private galleries to which Brian and I have responded – and the individual works we have acquired over the past 50+ years.
The time has come to consider the future of our close to 1000 piece multifaceted collection through the prism of next generation aspirations, passions & needs.
The works offered in the Sherman 100 Bonhams auction represent so much to us personally. Layers of meaning symbolically embedded within the works on offer, bear testament to our life and love as a couple, our shared history across time and place and, most importantly, our memories of Sherman Galleries – including the friendships we developed, and have maintained over decades, with treasured
artists.

Dr Gene Sherman AM
March 2022