SARAH AWAD To Hold a Thing

Night Gallery is pleased to present To Hold a Thing, an exhibition of new paintings by Sarah Awad. This will be the artist's third solo show with the gallery following Double Field (2018) and Tender Observer (2021).

In To Hold a Thing, Awad continues to explore the space between abstract and figurative painting. Each canvas begins with an expressive underpainting rendered in watercolor and vinyl paint. The artist then studies these improvisations: She makes charcoal-on-paper drawings in response to their marks, then seeks out the figures within the fields of lush color, coaxing each body out into the open with fluid gestural lines set against vivid chunks of oil paint.

Awad manipulates paint with intuition and the focus of a seasoned alchemist. Through years of study and practice, she has come to control not only the way that colors respond to one another visually, but also how pigments interact on a molecular level. Painting wet into wet with different water soluble mediums prompts chemical reactions. While suspended in water, red repels white and yellow absorbs black. When these reactions settle, they become frozen in time like igneous rock formations on the surface of her canvases. These moments are then delicately embellished with layers upon layers of oil paint, and an even richer surface remains. 

The nude figures in Awad’s compositions do not depict any specific person or persons. Instead, they can be seen as ghosts from the rich history of Western painting. Echos of Gauguin, Picasso, DeKooning, Cassatt, and numerous other familiars vibrate within her electric colors. The nude, female form as subject exists as a through line in this history, and in these paintings it becomes a marker of “subject” to be sought out by the viewer, who is tasked with the puzzle of distinguishing the abstractions from the legs, breasts, faces, etc. These figures are pointedly not self portraits, but their ability to reflect on and exist within a tradition that is greater than any one individual is a comforting metaphor that unfolds on these canvases for both artist and viewer.