Introduction

Esther Schipper, Paris is pleased to announce Chambre de la vie parallèle, Sarah Buckner’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in our Paris location. On view will be new paintings and drawings. 

Following Buckner’s 2024 solo exhibition at Longlati Foundation in Shanghai, from which unseen preparatory drawings will be on view in Paris, the current selection of works on paper and paintings mark a new starting point for the artist: a space of beginnings, clarity, and potential transformation, even catharsis. 

Color plays a central role in these works, with tones of red, pink, and ochre evoking the vitality of the human body. Stains and layered textures give the works a tactile, organic quality, blurring the line between dream and reality. There’s a spontaneity in these marks, a sense of letting the materials guide the outcome while retaining a focus on essential truths. Hands, central to the creative process, leaving traces on the paper—stains of color that suggest skin and blood, feeling raw yet deliberate. These intimate marks reflect the immediacy of a moment, shaped chance but also evoking the fugue-like quality of desire. The choice of format—many works in the exhibition are small oil or ink sketches on paper—emphasizes a personal, even intimate engagement with its subjects. 

Chambre de la vie parallèle is inspired by the exhibition space’s mirror as a symbol of the porosity of reality and dream worlds, and, as the title suggests, of a portal to parallel states of being. Recalling the travels of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass into the realm of fantasy, Buckner’s protagonists appear to occupy similarly enchanted cosmos. 

Many figures in these new works remain female, sometimes accompanied by unnamed male figures. Buckner portrays these women as protagonists in a world in which form and meaning are wedded. The motifs appear quotidian and timeless: sometimes one seems to be observing quick sketches of everyday situations, snippets of dreams, or memories of details from art historical works, whereas other drawing have an enigmatic hold and suggesting archetypal scenarios. 

The works presented in Chambre de la vie parallèle explore intimacy not as spectacle but as a quiet, transformative force highlighting the act of painting as an intuitive and solitaire form of artistic expression. The layering of color with its interplay of sketchy and more finished sections, and the way Buckner’s handling highlights the physicality and vulnerability of the materials all contribute to a sense of introspection.