Sarah McEneaney

The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of the artist’s new egg tempera paintings of interiors, cityscapes, and self-portraits that were completed over the last two years. The exhibition is her second with the gallery.

The artist’s subject matter is drawn from her everyday, including keenly observed self-portraits, cityscapes, portraits of her dogs and cats, views of her studio, often with her at work at the easel or resting on the day bed nearby. Her paintings are diaristic in nature, painting moments in her life---large or small, whether quiet or momentous, all painted in vivid color with an acute eye for detail.

Hayden Herrera writes in the exhibition catalogue:

Much of her work’s emotional resonance comes from the completeness with which she records carefully chosen details and from the rigor with which she puts everything in its right place. Thus the position of a ladder, a laptop computer, a cat, or a pillow tells us something about the painter’s life and mood as do her facial features. Each book on a shelf, brick in a wall, leaf on a tree, pane in a window, splatter on the studio floor adds to the rich counterpoint of patterning versus areas of flat color. None of these details is painted in a fussy way- they are marked down because they constitute a crucial part of the artist’s life.

McEneaney received a certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied at Philadelphia College of the Arts. Her work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions including the Delaware Art Museum, Moore College of Art and Design, and a retrospective at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She has had numerous exhibitions both in New York and Philadelphia, where she has lived and worked for many years. She was recently awarded a Purchase Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

Catalogue available with essay by Hayden Herrera.