Dimmitt Contemporary Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Sara Genn from her recent series, New Alphabet. The artist will be present for the opening on Thursday, September 12th from 6:00 - 8:00 pm.
Canadian-born artist Sara Genn recently moved her studio from New York City to a 1960 midcentury house in Palm Springs, California. The glass-walled house, nestled within spaces of sublime quiet and at the edge of the wilderness of Joshua Tree, the high desert and the San Jacinto Mountains, has advanced the basic principles that have always driven her work: an economy of form, surface clarity and a fullness and purity of color. Now, instead of soldiering through the halogen lights of lower Manhattan, Genn’s paintings have emerged as totems to the crystalline California sunlight. Her large-scale paintings have also expanded to the size of her new environment -- immersive colorfields poured and brushed in sensuous forms that hint, at times, towards typography in a nod to her new location and how it has sparked new eyes and a visual language.
Genn’s Japanese maternal heritage has also influenced her execution and themes. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi and its principles acknowledge that objects and experiences are most beautiful when they evoke a feeling of spiritual longing. Her lush, saturated forms straddle weightiness and weightlessness, offering simultaneously a kind of laid-back intimacy and a place of visual shelter and excitement. As material objects, Genn’s paintings seem to float in space and blur the signifiers of gender, craft and monuments. Her light-bouncing voids and their edges are meticulously created freehand -- without digital or mechanical aids -- quietly working within the perfection of their own archaic technology: no projection, resist or tape is used.
Sara Genn is a Canadian-born artist. She graduated with a BFA from Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario. After 15 years in New York City, Genn relocated to California. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi and its principles acknowledge that objects and experiences are most beautiful when they evoke a feeling of spiritual longing. Genn’s Japanese maternal heritage has influenced her execution and themes. Her work also strives to offer simultaneously, a place of visual shelter and excitement and to occupy space with objects that blur the signifiers of gender, craft and monuments. As much as these works seek to embody colourfield foundations and to straddle the ineffable sensations of weightiness and weightlessness, they're also concerned with tactile materiality and surface illusions. The super-flatness of saturated void spaces and their edges are meticulously created freehand -- without digital or mechanical aids: no projection, resist or tape is used.