Sarah Buckner
golden blossom
2020
Oil on linen
50,5 x 61 x 2 cm (19 3/4 x 24 1/8 x 3/4 in)
Titled and dated verso
Sarah Buckner is a storyteller. In the past her image world was fed by multiple sources: real-life encounters, the dreams that sprang from them, books, and films. Thinking in paint, and through painting, Buckner has developed an intuitive and fluid approach that transforms these impressions through her material practice. Feeling both open-ended and precisely observed, her figures appear to emerge from a fully formed life of which we can catch a momentary glimpse. Bearing traces of the artist’s life—reading, dreaming, imagining—some paintings are lighthearted for reasons we may not know, other images may come across as portraying moments of anxiety, confusion, or hope.
Buckner’s works exude an interiority that is reminiscent of dreams, where an object can be many incongruous things simultaneously and signify opposite meanings without contradiction. Her paintings distill narratives into images full of mystery, their atmospheric scenes resonating with emotional potency. The exact nature of this charge remains elusive—even to the artist, she says—and this combination of specificity and openness may be one of the reasons for their fascination.
With the giant bright yellow disc surrounded by a circular row of petals as its main motif, this painting combines abstract and figurative elements. A number of figures appear in the flower's center, akin to spectral inhabitants. Especially the use of scale, gives golden blossom a dreamlike quality.
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