Sarah Blaustein : Overture
Installation View SARAH BLAUSTEIN: Overture, 2276 E. 16th Street, Los Angeles, California 90021, September 14 — October 19, 2024 Photography courtesy Ed Mumford and Night Gallery.
Night Gallery is pleased to announce Overture, an exhibition of new paintings by Sarah Blaustein. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and follows her participation in the group show The Big Picture, 2023.
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.
Sarah Blaustein Press Play R-10, 2023 ink and acrylic on canvas 95 1/2 x 75 1/2 in (242.6 x 191.8 cm) (SBS013) Photo Credit : Nik Massey
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.
Installation, View SARAH BLAUSTEIN: Overture, 2276 E. 16th Street, Los Angeles, California 90021, September 14 — October 19, 2024 Photography courtesy Ed Mumford and Night Gallery.
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.
Photo Credit : Cayce Clifford
Sarah Blaustein (b. 1982, San Francisco East Bay, CA). Blaustein is a visual artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recent solo exhibitions include Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art San José, San José, CA; private showing and salon at PACE Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; and Hesse Flatow Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been included in group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, NY; and Hesse Flatow East Gallery, Amagansett, NY. In January 2023, art historian Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA) spoke about her work at a private exhibition The Call and salon hosted by Jennifer Stockman (New York, NY). In September 2023, Blaustein showed her work at a private salon To Radiate hosted by Berggruen Gallery at Casa Cipriani (New York, NY) where art historian Laura D. Corey (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY), spoke about her work and Helen Hatch (MOMA, New York, NY) moderated the talk. In June and December 2023, she painted at the American Academy of Rome through their Artist and Scholars Program (Rome, Italy). Blaustein has exhibited her work at The Armory Show (New York, NY), Art Basel Miami Beach (Miami, FL), Dallas Art Fair (Dallas, TX) and Fog Design + Art (San Francisco, CA). In 2023, she exhibited her work in Trodden Path a group show at Hesse Flatow East (Amagansett, NY) and The Big Picture a group show at Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). In 2024, she showed her work in Abstract Perspectives and California Gold group shows at Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco, CA).
Overture opened on September 14 and will be on view until October 19 of this year at Night Gallery, located at 2276 E. 16th Street, Los Angeles, California 90021; the gallery’s website can be found here for more information about this exhibit and others. Sarah’s interview with the magazine can be found here
