Artist Profile

Sharon Florin, a born and raised New Yorker, has been an oil painter of the urban landscape for the past 30 years. She has exhibited since 1980 and her paintings have been shown in 15 solo exhibitions and in over 100 museum and gallery group shows. Sharon's paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, and can be found in many corporate collections around the country.

Her work has received awards from The National Association of Women Artists, The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, The Pen and Brush Club and the Butler Institute of American Art among others. In addition, Sharon's paintings have been reproduced as holiday cards, open-edition prints and in calendars. In 2006, her painting Feast of San Gennaro, was reproduced as the book cover for a sociology textbook. Florin also does commissioned work of specific sites and buildings.

The older buildings and side streets of New York hold a special fascination for her as she tries to capture the texture, detail and especially the light of the city. Her work documents what is so familiar, that you can walk by without noticing it, and yet tomorrow it may be gone.Art-O-Mat L.I.C presented Sharon Florin's "The Long Island City Series: Paintings and Prints by Sharon Florin" from an extensive body of oil paintings created by Florin over a period of 30 years in which she documented the changing face of Long Island City’s Hunters Point neighborhood.

Florin is a realist painter who sees the soul of the city through time. Time changes buildings, casting shadows at different hours of the day, turning concrete brick, stone and wood into patterned abstractions, if you are looking. She is intrigued by reflections, by the paradox of seemingly fixed materials in transition, depending on the sky, the sun, the moment.

As an artist, Florin is in love with the city's dynamism. She records the architecture of the city, not to suspend it in an amber of nostalgia but because to her history is animate, alive in these constructions, which represent an abstract order, a symmetry of dailiness.

"12 Years and Counting", a one person exhibition of Sharon’s work was held at The Creative Center, Arts in Healthcare, New York, NY. This exhibition celebrated Sharon's 12-year anniversary of cancer survivorship.