Sarah Cain
Sarah Cain (born February 3, 1979) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Sarah Cain | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Education | San Francisco Art Institute University of California, Berkeley |
Known for | Painting |
Website | http://www.sarahcainstudio.com/ |
Life
Cain was born in Albany, New York, growing up in nearby Kinderhook,[1] and moved to California in 1997 to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her BFA in 2001. She went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley receiving her MFA in studio art and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006.[2] Since 2007, she's lived and worked in Los Angeles.
Work
The paintings and installations of Sarah Cain employ a variety of materials including traditional canvas, stretcher bars, and paint, but also introducing unusual and poetic artifacts: from musical notations to leaves and branches, expanding outside of the two-dimensional plane of the canvas and into the surrounding environment, creating many site-specific installations.[3]
Critic Quinn Latimer in describing Cain's work writes "They court seemingly bad ideas — drawings sport feathers and doilies; installations feature eggs and hippy art teacher-like fabric swatches — and then transform them so deftly into serious painting that it can take a minute to understand what you’re looking at." [4] In 2011, Cain collaborated with noted Beat-era artist George Herms at the Orange County Museum of Art, where the curator Sarah Bancroft wrote for the accompanying catalog that the two artists share "an interest in language and a frustration over its limits in describing abstract work" [5]
In 2011, Cain completed a major site-specific work in a former Masonic lodge in Marfa, Texas, for Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). Titled Forget me not, the installation spread across the first floor of the building and explored the imagery of the forgot-me-not flower, used by Masons and later by Nazis. Exploring belief systems, doubt and faith, the paintings spread across the building's walls and floors. One large painting even incorporated an overturned cupboard into its composition. Such recycling and inclusion of domestic furniture has become a mainstay of Cain's practice; couches, chairs and benches figure large in her recent works. In 2015, she painted in red splatters a seat that her neighbor abandoned after his wedding was called off, calling it "Loveseat".[6]
She has had solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Aspen Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary, amongst others. And has been included in collective exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Imperial Belvedere Palace Museum in Vienna, and the Busan Biennale. In 2019, she completed her first major permanent public work at San Francisco International Airport: a 150-foot stained glass window with 270 colors, framed in soldered zinc, which was "painstakingly arranged so that no two adjoining fragments are the same shade."[7]
Poet Bernadette Mayer in her poem "Dear Sarah", described a painting by the artist as "it's like seeing a rainbow in the middle of the forest." [8]
Selected Exhibitions
- Sarah Cain, Aspen Art Museum at the Elk Camp on Snowmass Mountain, CO, 2017
- Sarah Cain: Now I'm going to tell you everything, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), CA, 2017
- Sarah Cain: The Imaginary Architecture of Love at Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, Raleigh, NC, 2015
- Sarah Cain: blue in your body, red when it hits the air at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 2015
- Painting in Place, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Los Angeles, CA[9], 2013
- Gold, Curated by Thomas Zaunschirm, Imperial Belvedere Palace Museum, Vienna, 2012
- SECA Art Award Exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 2007
- Sarah Cain: I Believe We Are Believers, Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA, 2006
- Sarah Cain: A River of If's, Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco, CA, 2005
Further reading
- "Sarah Cain" Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting, Phaidon, 2016
- Mayer, Bernadette, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, and Julian Myers. Sarah Cain - The Imaginary Architecture of Love, CAM Raleigh; North Carolina, DAP, 2015
- Sarah Cain Monograph, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, 2012
- Bancroft, Sarah, Two Schools of Cool, Orange County Museum of Art, Prestel. 2012
- Cornell, Lauren, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman, eds. Younger Than Jesus Artist Directory, New Museum & Phaidon Press. 2009
Selected Press
- "Frieze and Felix Turn Heads in Los Angeles" The New York Times, February 19, 2019
- "Review: Sarah Cain's 1000-Square Foot Painting is Just the Start" Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2019
- "Sarah Cain's paintings, with grit and spark" Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2015
- "Sarah Cain- Artists's Studio" MocaTV, October 18, 2013
- "Ten Questions... about painting" Flash Art. July 10, 2013
- "Review: Sarah Cain at Honor Fraser" Artforum, January 2013,
- "Interview with Sarah Cain" Flash Art, September 6, 2012 S
- "Coloring Outside the Lines" Modern Painters, June 2012
- "Space Invader." The New York Times Magazine, October 2, 2011
Public Collections
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Blanton Museum of Art: The University of Texas at Austin
Zabludowicz Collection, London
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York City
The Margulies Collection, Miami
Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio
Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY
External Links
Anthony Meier Fine Arts - Sarah Cain
Vielmetter Los Angeles - Sarah Cain
References
- Newell-Hanson, Alice (February 7, 2009). "The Artist Creating a 150-Foot-Long Glass Rainbow". The New York Times. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
- "CV". SARAH CAIN. Retrieved 2017-03-25.
- Garza, Evan J "Q&A: A Conversation with Sarah Cain," New American Painting, November 2010.
- Latimer, Quinn. SEILER + MOSSERI-MARLIO GALERIE, ZURICH "Sarah Cain: Double Future."
- Bancroft, Sarah, Two Schools of Cool, Orange County Museum of Art and Prestel Publishing, 2012.
- "Sarah Cain | Ocula". 2018-05-30. Retrieved 2018-05-30.
- Newell-Hanson, Alice (February 7, 2009). "The Artist Creating a 150-Foot-Long Glass Rainbow". The New York Times. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
- Meyer, Bernadette (2015). Dear Sarah. Raleigh: Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh / DAP. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-9906909-1-7.
- Knight, Christopher (June 12, 2013). "Review: 'Painting in Place' flings open conceptual abstraction doors". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 19, 2019.