Sherry Giryotas is an American abstract painter whose richly layered works explore memory, landscape, movement, and the tension between order and chaos. Drawing upon a life shaped by extensive travel and immersion in different cultures, Giryotas creates what she describes as internalized landscapes—paintings that do not depict a specific place so much as distill the experience and memory of being there.

Giryotas works primarily in oil and mixed media, building her compositions through an intuitive process of drawing, mark-making, layering, obscuring, and repainting. Color, line, pattern, and gestural brushwork move across the surface, shifting between loosely suggested landscape forms and complete abstraction. The resulting paintings possess a sense of accumulated time: earlier marks remain partially visible beneath subsequent layers, much as memories of different places and experiences overlap in the mind.

Landscape has remained an important point of departure throughout Giryotas’s career. Her regular travels between Texas and Michigan have provided particularly fertile material, bringing together the expansive light and terrain of the Southwest with the waterways, vegetation, and seasonal changes of the Midwest. Rather than recording these environments literally, she transforms observations of changing light, natural forms, and human intervention into compositions that balance structure with spontaneity. Urban and rural imagery, past and present, and remembered and immediate experience merge into a complex visual vocabulary.

Giryotas has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Her work has been presented at institutions and venues including the Georgian Art Museum in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia; the South Bend Museum of Art in Indiana; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and galleries in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States. In 2021, the Longview Museum of Fine Arts in Texas presented Sherry Giryotas: Seeking Place, an exhibition of paintings developed over approximately a decade of travel between Texas and Michigan and centered on her observations of landscape and environmental change.

Her career has also been recognized through significant artist residencies, fellowships, and grants. Giryotas has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as individual artist fellowship grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

Giryotas’s work is represented in public and institutional collections including the South Bend Museum of Art, the Illinois State Museum, the Illinois Collection at the State of Illinois Center in Chicago, and the International Sculpture Symposium in Rustavi, Republic of Georgia.

At the heart of Giryotas’s practice is the idea of painting as a record of passage. Her canvases gather fragments of landscape, light, travel, and memory without resolving them into a single narrative. Instead, they become dynamic visual environments in which color and gesture suggest the continual movement between places, experiences, and recollections. Through this process, Giryotas transforms the observed world into something more personal and universal—a landscape reconstructed through memory.

For more information, please fill out the form below:

Or call Judy directly at 574-276-6001.