PARIS.- The gallery is now presenting her first solo exhibition Toccata at Almine Rech Paris, Turenne, which opened on September 7, 2023. Her work will be featured at Paris+ par Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023.

“Toccata” refers to a composition style specific to Baroque music and applied to various instruments (essentially keyboards, but not only); the term comes from the Italian for touched in the feminine form. So-called toccata pieces generally emphasize “contact” with the instrument. Toccata originally encouraged improvisation, and has taken many different forms over the centuries. The title certainly underscores the tactile and rhythmic qualities of Sasha Ferré’s work, but it also invites the viewer to listen to the colors of her paintings rather than just look at them. — Cédric Fauq, chief curator at CAPC, Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, France

Sasha Ferré’s practice celebrates painting as a site of limitless imagination in which form, matter and meaning spontaneously and continuously grow together. Her visual language takes shape from her intimate relationship to her medium. She keeps physically close to her artworks by involving her whole body in her process. Working alla prima, she uses oil sticks in ample energized gestures and directly applies the material with her hands, disposing of brushes in order to create a completely unmediated relationship to the material. Each of Ferré’s abstract landscapes takes shape through improvisation. Ferré delights in the idea of the unknown, allowing abstraction to unfold uninhibitedly in a process similar to jazz music.

"After seeing a painting of hers at a collector’s home, I approached Sasha about visiting her studio in Paris. When I arrived, I was impressed by the quantity of unstretched painted canvases in progress on the floor and their intense luminosity. Sasha's brushwork releases a tremendous energy, she is able to harness free mark-making which, of course, can be observed in a different way in the paintings of Poons and Förg. Her passionate dedication to color also reminds me of John McCracken, whose work I love and who was one of my first artists. These relationships connect Sasha with the art the gallery has long been showcasing. In her own way, she renews and reinvigorates the histories of gesture and color theory that have long been present in the history of abstract painting." — Almine Rech

Almine Rech
Sasha Ferré: 'Toccata'
September 7th, 2023 - October 7th, 2023