Erin Shirreff: New Work — Erin Shirreff

Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present Erin Shirreff: New Work, a solo exhibition of new photographic works in the back galleries, on view from October 30-December 19, 2026.

Erin Shirreff’s new body of work continues her thinking through object-image translation and how a sense of materiality—our experience of an object—is lost or gained through image. These new cyanotypes and print collages both inspire and rework Shirreff’s sculptural practice. Her collaged prints reimagine her previous sculpture as intangible forms—dissecting and rebuilding them anew—while her cyanotypes inspire new Corten steel sculptures.

Included in the exhibition is a series of collaged archival pigment prints titled Ctlg. Constructed of layered photographs of cast components of her own earlier sculptural work, Shirreff creates new, imagined sculptures. Each photograph acts as a building block, simultaneously adding a component to the image and obfuscating the elements underneath. Through layering, Shirreff builds out shapes that can defy and stretch the physical limits that constrain three-dimensional objects. Initially the forms’ structure is plausible, but closer inspection reveals its impossibility—playfully jutting out, folding in on itself, and extending beyond the restrictions of gravity. Shirreff’s assembled sculptures appear both weightless and unmoored, floating on a pale blue background, and solidly grounded.

New Work also includes a selection of cyanotype photograms, toned to shades of brown, dusty purple, pink, and muted blue. The photograms bear traces of vague, shadowy forms: undulating curves swoop over distinct, sharp lines and dark jagged shadows contrast the bright white of paper untouched by light. Here as in the other works on view, Shirreff creates a kind of two-dimensional sculpture on paper, retaining the depth of an object within the confines of a singular plane.

Erin Shirreff (born 1975) lives and works in Montréal. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wis. (2025); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2024); the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2021–22); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2016); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015). A monograph chronicling twenty years of her photography, sculpture, and video work was published this year by Gregory R. Miller & Co.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. Shirreff earned an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2005.