Katherine Sherwood

AGGRESSIVE WOMEN, 2024-25

Katherine Sherwood’s Aggressive Women (2024-25) series features portraits of dominatrixes and Catholic female saints drawn from black-and-white personal ads in 1970s BDSM magazines and religious prayer cards she encountered in her Catholic high school. The paintings are displayed in beat-up thrift-store frames and installed salon-style, from floor to ceiling.

Sherwood “crips” the figures by giving them prosthetics, wheelchairs, and canes - visual affirmations of disability grounded in her own experience following a stroke in 1997. The work builds on themes developed in her recent Pandemic Madonnas series (2019–2024), which cast disabled bodies in sacred, defiant roles.

Sherwood first created Aggressive Women in 1977–78, shortly after graduating from UC Davis. Shaped by a punk DIY ethos, confrontational feminism, and a self-taught, visually blunt approach to figuration, the original series was first shown at Paule Anglim Gallery in San Francisco, marking the beginning of Sherwood’s long relationship with the gallery.

A selection of over 70 works from the new and old series will be on view at George Adams Gallery, New York, September–October 2025.