Sarah Buckner Schwalbe, 2023

Sarah Buckner’s new paintings continue the artist’s dream-like motifs, creating a world of her own making, invested with powerful emotional significance. The new works feature mythical figures, literary heroines and real-life characters, transformed in the artist’s imagination and imbued with meaning gleaned from her own life.

The majority of figures in these new works remain female, among them literary heroines such as Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope described by Homer, or Virgil’s tragic princess Dido. Buckner portrays these women as protagonists in a world in which form and meaning are wedded. The elusive nods to myth or literature are more emotional reference points than sources for these motifs. The depicted figures and situations appear both open-ended and precisely observed, as if emerging from a fully formed narrative of which viewers can only catch a momentary glimpse. The works exude an interiority reminiscent of dreams, where an object can be many incongruous things simultaneously.