Objects Department: Gilding stabilization on contemporary sculpture

Senior Objects Conservator Tonja inspecting Skippers (Kneedeep) #8, 2023 by Tsherin Sherpa.

Monterey Museum of Art is located at the ocean’s edge on historic Cannery Row and features rotating exhibits dedicated to visual arts that engage the community with the diversity of California art. In 2023, the museum hosted the first solo exhibition in California of contemporary Nepalese artist Tsherin Sherpa, Different Worlds, curated by Corey Madden.

Sherpa was born in Kathmandu in 1968 and trained under his father, Master Urgen Dorje, in thangka (paintings that can be rolled), a traditional Tibetan art form used in meditation to depict Buddhist deities on cloth or silk. The highly elaborate compositions feature a central deity, either animal or human, that is often surrounded by other figures in a symmetrical geometric composition. In the late 1980s, Sherpa moved to Taiwan to study computer science and Mandarin and then emigrated to California in 1998, where he taught traditional art at Tibetan Buddhist centers. Since then, Sherpa has focused on developing a painting and sculpture practice that blends his traditional upbringing as a thangka painter with contemporary perspectives.

This sculpture, titled Skippers (Kneedeep) #8, 2023, is acrylic, ink, and gilding on fiberglass and was brought to the Preservation Arts studio for stabilization and consolidation of areas of lifting and delaminating gold leaf. The sculpture was surface cleaned, areas of the lifting gilding were re-adhered, and minor losses on the figure were inpainted with dry bronze pigment. The same technique was used to fill small losses to the gilding on the left wrist.

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Detail image of lifting gilding before and after treatment.

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