Christopher Russell Acquired by Sheldon Museum of Art

The gallery is thrilled to announce that a major work by Christopher Russell, “Explosion #10” (2014), has been acquired by the Sheldon Museum of Art.

Sheldon Museum of Art’s landmark Philip Johnson–designed building houses the collections of the Sheldon Art Association, founded in 1888, and the University of Nebraska. Together, the collections comprise more than 12,000 artworks in diverse media. The museum’s comprehensive collection of American art includes prominent holdings of 19th-century landscape and still life, American Impressionism, early Modernism, geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, pop, minimalism and contemporary art.

Dealing less with the supernatural than the psychosomatic, Christopher Russell rouses ghosts. Within his scratched photographs, fractured glass panes, and hazy metallic paints, there are haunting recollections – the kind of outlier memories that plague our psyche well after childhood. Through a purposefully repressive fog, we habitually revisit the monsters of our innermost mentality, and find ourselves the protagonist of a lifelong plight – a cinematic tale evocatively illustrated by Russell’s eerie ships and spectral trees. Like a folkloric odyssey into a cognitive web, his mixed-media works and installations traipse through places of fragility and wistfulness; evidence of the divine and unsettling encounters inherent to our complex mortality.