Sarah Blaustein: Overture

Painter Sarah Blaustein captures fleeting moments of creativity and collision. The artist’s studio labors remain unseen, while her paintings record the blossoming of ink and acrylic across wet canvas. Domestic tools such as rags, sponges, and house painters’ brushes aid the artist as she applies paint, and water gives the marks new life. Her canvases encourage viewers to focus on the here and now, to feel more human and alive.

Blaustein conceives of her Night Gallery show as an overture: an introductory piece of music that produces a powerful sense of movement. The composer (here, the artist) guides the audience from the chaos of life into a focused, intentional place of being. The exhibition title also positions Blaustein as an artist confident in her rhythms, at the threshold of extended composition.

Blaustein made her Overture paintings in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives and works, and at the American Academy of Rome, where she was a 2023 Visiting Artist. In Rome, the artist listened to Beethoven’s “Coriolan Overture,” took inspiration from the city’s operatic fountains, and began working with Italian canvases that held water for twice as long as their American counterparts. The new substrate allowed Blaustein time to re-enter her paintings, to begin working over strokes she’d previously considered finished at first touch.

This new approach is evident in works such as Press Play IT-14 (2023), a dynamic composition of jagged marks and softer featherings that appear to simultaneously erupt from the bottom of the canvas and to move back towards an unspecified origin. To further the symphonic effect, Blaustein sets bright blues, purples, and pinks against an alternately soft and acidic yellow background. As in many of her Press Play IT canvases, beauty emerges from turmoil and revision.

Elsewhere, the artist’s marks radiate from her paintings’ centers to suggest feminine forms and budding flowers. If Blaustein’s paintings evoke O’Keeffe’s ecologies and Frankenthaler’s soak-stains, they also demonstrate a contemporary dilemma: the desire to turn inward while contending with an inescapably violent, disordered world.