Sarah Awad

February 26, 2014, 10:23am

Literally Figurative: Sarah Awad

The Women was the title of Sarah Awad's (NAP #93) first solo exhibition at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art this past November.  The press release provides an immediate context for the work: “The artist reawakens our detached assumptions about the transcendent purity of minimalism and -- in what becomes a return of ‘The Return of the Figure’ -- continues a contemporary conversation with the work of Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas, and John Currin.”  The figure in art can exist as a fundamentally formal aspect of how we perceive 2D images (any shape on a picture plane that appears in front of a pictorial ground is technically a figure), and also as the specific subject matter designation of people in the picture.  Somewhere between and to the side of those notions is the issue of the female nude in art. – Jason Ramos, Los Angeles Contributor

Sarah Awad | The Women, installation view, Courtesy of Diane Rosenstein Fine Art/photo by Craig Kirk

June 29, 2012, 8:15am

40 Galleries You Should Know if You Love Paint

It is a simple truth that in any given month, if you added up all of the available space in commercial galleries around the country, the amount dedicated to painting would dwarf that of all other media. The list that I have compiled consists of 40 United States’ based galleries that have a proclivity for painting. That is not to say that painting is the only medium that these galleries show; indeed, most represent artists producing work in a range of media. All of them, however, have shown a particular interest in the medium over an extended period of time, and all have stables of artists that are at least 50% painters.

September 09, 2011, 9:30am

The Atmosphere of Painted Spaces: Sarah Awad and Storm Tharp

Playful demystification inhabits the center of Los Angeles artist Sarah Awad’s Instruments of Culture at Seattle’s James Harris Gallery, a series of large, densely painted canvases depicting the statuary and halls of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Layered with oil to the point that marble sculptures become ghostlike and courtyards become abstracted spaces of color blocks and sketched lines, this series of work accentuates the absurdities of the object display that represents standard practice in museums.