NEW YORK, NY.- Jane Lombard Gallery is presenting Clatter…..THUD, an exhibition of new paintings by UK-based Irish artist Sarah Dwyer. The artist’s third solo show with the gallery introduces figurative abstractions that grapple with the ever-changing body and the physical manifestation of the psyche. Canvases thrum with a freewheeling, helter-skelter conversation between familiar forms, worked and reworked tirelessly by Dwyer. The artist’s intuitive use of color takes on a presence and character of its own, a masterful counterpoint to the rhythm of gesture and line. Woven throughout the narrative fabric of each piece, Dwyer tells stories drawn from her own life, poetry, Jungian archetypes, and literary influences. Clatter…..THUD will be on view from September 9th to October 15th, 2022.
With a wink and a wry smile, “Clatter…..THUD” attempts to vocalize the frenetic, dramatic off-kilter intensity found within Dwyer’s paintings. Lyrical lines collide with anthropomorphic forms, layers of multidimensional color underpinning the interplay. Feet-like shapes boldly jut across Dwyer’s compositions, punctuating a staccato cadence throughout the new works. The figure itself becomes an expressive device in Clatter…..THUD, moving and contorting like a boxer, dancing and jabbing in front of the canvas.
In her most recent work, life drawing anchors Dwyer’s practice. The conversation between the figure and the artist’s hand evolves through the seams, creases, and cracks of flesh, and the weight, line, and form of the corresponding marks. Exploratory and dynamic, Dwyer wields drawing as a method of processing her own relationship with the body and confronting the experiences of which the body keeps score. In performing the body’s expansion and contraction, growth, loss, and change, life drawing becomes a tripartite act of survival, celebration, and achievement.
Disjointed body parts, sometimes grotesque, sometimes embryonic, dialogue with one another throughout the paintings. Within Verdant Tangle (2022), what could appear to be legs, a torso, breasts, and hair are fragmented and reoriented. The distorted figures, assertive limbs, and confrontational appendages live in the space where truth and invention merge. The background blocks of color reveal brilliant layers of complementary hues which vibrate with energy.
This exhibition affirms Dwyer’s stylistic shift from ethereal and light, to figurations that sit more prominently in the frame. The transformation speaks to the weight of life experience that accumulates with time, and the distinctly female burden that Dwyer describes as “carrying it with you on both your hips and your shoulders.” In Clatter…..THUD, Dwyer positions the body as a complex locus of joy, pain, loss, entrapment, terror, and triumph, and invites viewers to honor these myriad dimensions of embodiment.
Sarah Dwyer (b. 1974, Ireland) is a painter who lives and works in London. Drawing is at the heart of her process, often combined with painting, printmaking, and sculpture, resulting in reimaginings of the familiar through exuberant color palettes and lively approaches to mark-making. Incorporating both figurative and abstract imagery, her dynamic compositions are the result of processing her own surroundings and the human day-to-day experience, in addition to an indulgence in our desire for play. Surfaces, in turn, retain traces of process and development within their own archive and present the viewer with a navigable visual history.
Dwyer earned a Master’s in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2004 after an MFA from Staffordshire University in 2001. Her work has most recently been exhibited at Fabian Lang Gallery, Zurich; PiArtworks, London; Pigeon Park, Manor Place, London; in three solo shows at Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK; Hair & Nails Gallery, MN; Rochester Art Center, MN; Bloomberg Space, London, UK; Kyubidou Gallery, Tokyo, JP; Jane Lombard Gallery NY, NY; Fe McWilliam Gallery, NIR; Royal College of Art, London, UK; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, IE.
