Scherer And Ouporov

TREE OF LIFE

artist statment



Oh, I who long to grow, I look outside myself, and the tree inside me grows. --Rainer Maria Rilke

The Tree of Life, a universal symbol found in nearly every religion and cultural mythology, has long been one of the most prevalent themes in our work. Our home in South Florida, once surrounded by lush vegetation and banyan trees, is now barren after two years of devastating hurricanes brought down mountains of uprooted trees. As we plant new trees and watch the rapid growth of life replacing that which was destroyed we are reminded daily of nature’s endless cycle of death, transformation and renewal. The banyan tree, representing to us the ultimate symbol of creation and regeneration, led us to the further exploration of the Tree of Life as is appears in various art historical forms and literature. Our recent works incorporate the results of our research into a body of egg tempera paintings on wood panel, DVD projection, and photographs printed on various media. .

Jacob’s Ladder, As Above So Below, Twilight (2004), Tree Whisperer (2005), and Emmerson (2004-6) are a part of our Celestial Alphabet series, in which we merged ancient sacred writing based on the stars into a symbolic landscape. This series also reflects our ongoing interest in linguistics and the origins of language.

Hands of My Mother, 2005 and Marisol’s Dream, 2005, are transitional pieces that incorporate excerpts from Susan Griffin’s poem, “Matter” (“Woman and Nature”, 1978):

“I know I am made from this earth, as my mother’s hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what I know: the light is in us.”

Talking Tree, 2006, is a turning point in our work and the first collaboration with our 3-year old son who invented a story about a talking tree filled with animals. The painting was inspired by a 15th century Persian miniature, “Alexander and the Talking Tree” as well as the spiraling motif in Gustav Klimt’s notorious “Tree of Life” frieze (1905-1911). Upon completion of this painting and after visiting the Fra Angelico exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we began a large wall installation piece, Tree of Life, in which 12 round interchangeable panels depict floating winged figures, mounted upon a golden tree of life scheme based on our Talking Tree painting.

The Celestial Tree, 2006 began with a Tree of the Universe relief from China (168 AD) that we carved and gilded into the background of the wood panel. We later incorporated decorative motifs below the seated figure to reinforce the circular cosmic tree theme. The golden band of text, in Old Russian, is an ancient Chinese proverb “Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.”

The theme of angels, like the tree of life, appears in nearly every culture and major religion. We became interested in their depiction when doing research on the celestial alphabet and tree of life. Also referred to as the “angelic script”, the celestial alphabet was widely believed in the Renaissance to have been sent by messenger angels to form the original language of Eden with which Adam named all things. Angels are also present as guardians of the tree of life and knowledge. In many cultures they were seen as celestial intelligences that influence the movement of the heavenly bodies, understanding and communicating divine language to humankind.

Newborn, 2006, is the first of our angel depictions. Inspired by Fra Angelico’s paintings, which seem today so fresh and contemporary, we began to experiment with gilding by stamping, inscribing and painting the surface of the gold leaf with oil glazes. The text surrounding the infant, painted with gold mica powder, begins with a Native American (Seminole) song-poem, “Song for Bringing a Child into the World”: Let the child be born, you day-sun, circling around, you daylight, circling around, you night sun, circling around…and ends with a fragment of William Blake’s (1789) “A Cradle Song”:

Sweet dreams form a shade

O’er my lovely infant’s head;

Sweet dreams of pleasant streams’

By happy, silent, moony beams.

Sweet sleep with soft down

Weave thy brows an infant crown.

Sweet sleep, Angel mild,

Hover o’er my happy child.

In Guardian, 2006, the gilded tree is based on a bronze Tree of Life and Knowledge sculpture from India. (1336-1546) We became fascinated with this sculpture because images of birds and wings form a tree, thus merging the bird and tree as one unified form. The golden text painted below is Indian poet Sri Aurobindo’s, “A Child's Imagination”(1895-1908):

O thou golden image,

Miniature of bliss,

Speaking sweetly, speaking meetly!

Every word deserves a kiss.

Strange, remote and splendid

Childhood's fancy pure

Thrills to thoughts we cannot fathom,

Quick felicities obscure.

When the eyes grown solemn

Laughter fades away,

Nature of her mighty childhood

Recollects the Titan play;

Woodlands touched by sunlight

Where the elves abode,

Giant meetings,Titan greetings,

Fancies of a youthful God.

Gia, 2006, (in progress), is a variation of the tree-bird image, influenced by Alexander Fisher’s Art Nouveau “Peacock Sconce (1899). In this painting we contrasted yellow gold and platinum to emphasize the shape of the peacock-tree image, and outlined with red-earth the stylized curvilinear feather forms to emulate branches of a tree.

Since the beginning of our art career we have been inspired and relied upon the use of photography. Although we are known primarily for egg tempera paintings, silverpoint drawing, and intaglio prints, we only recently began to exhibit our photographic works. Our latest experimentations combine the earliest art and photo processes such as gilding and large format photography with the latest innovations in technology. As in all of our work they address universal ideas with highly symbolic imagery and the connection of humanity to the environment.

Printed in 2005, Tree-Rain, Ringing Rocks, Downpour, Umbilical Tree, and Jacob’s Ladder, are a part of the Celestial Alphabet series and the images that formed the basis for many of our paintings. All of these photo objects were created with a technique that we devised similar to the age-old method of producing mirrors. Combining the old with new, we printed these images on a transparent surface, duraclear mounted on plexiglass, and gilded the back with red clay bole and 22 k. gold leaf. The Gathering Tree (front), The Gathering Tree (back), and Roots, 2005, are large scale chromogenic prints. This banyan, an historical tree located in a national park on Fort Lauderdale beach, is a part of my (Suzanne) earliest childhood memories and for generations has been an important gathering place for families and visitors from around the world.

Tree-Rain, 2006, is a short DVD on a loop featuring a large scale banyan tree on a rainy day with text moving in a continuous vertical format emulating rain. The title and the piece were inspired by Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem The Gul-Mullah’s Trumpet, in which he evokes ancient mystical associations about the banyan tree. The idea behind Tree-Rain began three years ago, while reading Russian Symbolist poet and theorist Andrei Bely’s Glossolalia, we discovered that many of our infant’s first attempts at pronouncing syllables and words corresponded linguistically to Bely’s concepts on the relationship between sound and the senses. A theory of the origin of the universe based on sound, Glossolalia is structured on a verbal and spatial logic based on repetition of sound, roots, and words. In one section of his poem, he plays on the interconnection of sounds, theoretically and mystically, with the letter “M”, such as in Am, Om, Mama, Dom (in Russian-home), Kram (Russian Cathedral), and amor. Taking note of our son’s first sounds and words, such as mama, mmm, yum, we compiled our own list of related maternal words such as womb, woman, man, warm, embryo, moloko (in Russian milk) and so on. Together with Bely, these words and sounds form a loop in the Tree-Rain film.

Scherer & Ouporov, 2006

The Museum of Contemporary Art Miami, MOCA at Goldman Warehouse is featuring New Art: South Florida, an exhibition highlighting the recent works of Scherer & Ouporov and 13 other recipients of the 2007 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowships for Visual and Media Artists, from September 8-October 27, 2007.

In the video, Tree-Rain, Scherer & Ouporov investigate relationships between nature and language. By making reference to Russian art history and literature, they combine text and images to formulate symbolic reference.



Coral Springs Museum of Art is presenting a survey of Scherer & Ouporov’s rich collaborative body of works from 1999 to 2007, with over 40 paintings, drawings, etchings, photographs, video, and interactive installations. The majority of works are on loan from private collections all over the United States. Entitled One Voice, this solo exhibition, runs from September 7 until November 17, 2007.


Scherer & Ouporov are exhibiting their latest installation, Glossololia, and photographic works as a part of Florida Atlantic University 's 2007 Biennial Art Faculty Exhibition from September 8 to October 27, 2007 in the Schmidt Center Gallery.



Scherer & Ouporov's work is included in Art & Psyche: The Freudian Legacy, at CDS Gallery, New York from September 14 to November 29, 2007. Curated by Lynn Gamwell, author of Dreams 1900-2000-Art, Science, and the Unconscious Mind, this exhibition traces the complex, evolving relationship between the visual arts and psychoanalytic thought throughout the 20th century and up to present day. According to this thoughtful survey, the works of Jonathan Borovsky, Max Ernst, Eric Fischl, Lucien Freud, Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, Jackson Pollock, and Scherer & Ouporov, among others, served as visual manifestations of Freud’s “unconscious” musings. Gamwell states: “…Scherer and Ouporov and Jonathan Borovsky examine the fraught relationship between dreams and the waking life."

Participating artists:

Nicolas Africano, Jonathan Borofsky, Charles Brown, Julie Cockburn, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Timothy Cummings, Edmund Engelman, Max Ernst, Eric Fischl, Gonzalo Fonseca, Lucian Freud, Arshile Gorky, Marcel Jean, Leon Kelly, Roberto Matta, Charles Matton, Jorge Michel, Odd Nerdrum, Jackson Pollock, Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov, Kurt Seligmann, Hedda Sterne, Christian Vincent

Scherer & Ouporov's recent photography work is featured in the Cultural Quarterly , A Broward County Board of County Commissioners Publication, Spring, 2007, pp. 30-35, including two full-page fold out sections.


Scherer & Ouporov were selected as 2007 recipients of the highly coveted South Florida Cultura l Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists. Based solely on the quality of the artists' work, the recipients were selected by regional and national arts experts Regina Bailey, The Wolfsonian, Miami, Kelly Gordon, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., David Cabrera, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Bill Fagaly, New Orleans Museum of Art among others. An exhibition featuring their work will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami, in September, 2007.



Opening April 13th, 2007, the artists will present new work in a two-person exhibition entitled Silver and Gold along with fellow egg tempera painter Fred Wessel at the Arden Gallery, Boston. The April issue of Art News features works and details about the show.


Scherer and Ouporov are preparing for a major solo museum exhibition opening at the University of Mary Washington Galleries in Fredericksburg,VA from March 15-June 3, 2007 and traveling to the Coral Springs Museum of Art in Coral Springs, FL, September 7-November 17, 2007.



The artists' solo exhibition, Tree of Life, opened on May 4, 2006, at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery,
521 West 26th Street. The show consisted of paintings, silverpoint drawings, photography, and a DVD projection. A catalog is available with essay by John O'Hern for $25 USD. The Tree of Life installation and several new pieces have been selected for the Eighth Annual Realism Invitational, on view from June 1-July 15, 2006, at both Jenkins Johnson Gallery's New York and San Francisco locations.



The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin featured five Scherer and Ouporov paintings in the exhibition Dreamscapes which ran from September 25, 2005-January 28, 2006 (below).




Scherer and Ouporov's solo exhibition, "Celestial Alphabet", at the Turner Carroll Gallery was reviewed in the April, 2005 issue of Art in America by Sarah S. King (below).






The artists' successful solo exhibition at the Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, July-August, 2004, was met with good critical response.








Scherer and Ouporov's diptych, Death Portraits, Suzanne and Pavel, were recently acquisitioned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, NM, where they are currently on view in the exhibition Contemporary Works on Paper from the Collection. The prints are also in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, Library of Congress in Washington DC, and the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts in Ekaterinburg, Russia.



From June 11 through July 12, A Tribute to Robert Blackburn and the Printmaking Workshop, at Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art, New York, the artists works were included in a show featuring some of the most accomplished printmakers from the legendary Printmaking Workshop which Robert Blackburn had founded and supported for more than 50 years, before his death in May, 2003.

Steps, 1999, intagl io on paper, 22 x 20.5 in.

From June 28 through September 7, 2003, Scherer & Ouporov's work was on view in Genetic Expressions: Art After DNA at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Watson and Crick's Nobel Prize-winning discovery, Genetic Expressions featured biology-inspired art along with images from science and popular culture to explore the myriad ways in which cracking the genetic code has changed our world.

Scherer & Ouporov's painting, The Family of Apes, was reviewed in the New York Times, Sunday, July 27, 2003, by Helen A. Harrison and featured on the cover of the weekend section of the New York Newsday, June 27, 2003.



The Family of Apes, 1994
egg tempera on wood panel, 16 x 20 in. Private Collection.








Scherer & Ouporov's prints have been selected for the traveling exhibition Creative Space: Fifty Years of Rober t Blackburn'sPrintmaking Workshop, A Library of Congress exhibition in Collaboration with International Print Center New York (IPCNY) and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. The exhibition runs through January 25, 2003 at the IPCNY in Chelsea and opens at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC on February 26, 2003. The Library of Congress recently acquisitioned six Scherer & Ouporov prints for their permanent collection.


The artists have five of their paintings included in the traveling museum exhibition, Tempera/New Temperaments at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle WA opening March 7, 2003 through June 1, 2003. The exhibition is accompanied by a full color catalog with essay written by Director, John W. Streetman III.

The artists' painting "Guillaume" was featured in the Critics' Picks section of the Seattle Times, March 9, 2003.



January 18 thro ugh May 10 Scherer & Ouporov are exhibiting in Magic Realism at Sangre De Christo Arts Center in Pueblo, CO.



An in-depth interview and photos of the artists and their works are included in the recent publication, Intimate Creativity: Partners in Love and Art, by psychologists Irving and Suzanne Sarnoff, published by The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. The celebrated couples profiled here include Scherer & Ouporov, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, and Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel. The authors also draw on historical and contemporary literature about similar couples, ranging from Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber to Gilbert and George to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.




To order the publication "Intimate Creativity: Partners in Love and Art" go to






Several of Scherer & Ouporov's paintings are included in the important traveling international exhibition and accompanying hard cover publication, Dreams 1900-2000, Science, Art and the Unconscious Mind, edited by Lynn Gamwell with essays by Donald Kuspit and Ernest Hartmann, published by Cornell University Press, Binghamton University Art Museum, State University of New York, 2000.









To order the publication "Dreams 1900-2000: Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind" go to

American-born Suzanne Scherer and Russian-born Pavel Ouporov are a husband-and-wife artist team who met in Moscow in 1989 as students at the esteemed Moscow Surikov State Academic Art Insitute.Scherer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida State University, a Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, and received an International Research & Exchanges Board Award to be the first American visual artist accepted for advanced studies in the former Soviet Union. At the age of 11, Ouporov won admittance into the Moscow Academic Art Lyceum of the Russian Art Academy, graduated at the age of 18 and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Moscow Surikov State Academic Art Institute. In 1991, he immigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1999.

Scherer & Ouporov have since received international recognition for their collaborative works encompassing painting, photography, video, installation, mixed-medium construction, and performance that draws on Russian icon painting, figuration as well as Russian Symbolist and Futurist poetry. Their works are exhibited and included in many public collections internationally including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, Harvard University Fogg Art Museum, and The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

Scherer & Ouporov’s works are represented by the Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York and San Francisco, Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, and Arden Gallery in Boston. The artists recently relocated from New York City to South Florida and are Professors of Art at Florida Atlantic University. They are currently preparing for exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Coral Springs Museum of Art in Florida, and CDS Gallery in New York.

Scherer & Ouporov were selected as 2007 recipients of the highly coveted South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists. Based solely on the quality of the artists' work, the recipients were selected by regional and national arts experts Regina Bailey, The Wolfsonian, Miami, Kelly Gordon, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., David Cabrera, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Bill Fagaly, New Orleans Museum of Art among others. An exhibition featuring their work will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami, in September, 2007.