Sarah McEneaney

Sarah McEneaney

Home is Studio - Studio is Home

Opens March 12, 3-6pm

March 12 to April 23, 2022

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Sarah McEneaney, Home is Studio - Studio is Home, an exhibition of new paintings. This is the artist's eighth show at the gallery.

The exhibition will consist of eight paintings all made since 2019 coinciding with the global pandemic, quarantine and its continuing aftermath. In these works, McEneaney continues her project of documenting her life and surroundings in self-portraits and interiors. With travel mostly off the table, all the works are local, as in the title of the exhibition home is studio – studio is home, a building in Philadelphia where she has lived and worked since leaving art school in 1979. In this exhibition McEneaney paints herself working, sometimes in mid-brush stroke and drawing in her living room. Her pets, as in previous work are often depicted as living subjects, and also as painted and sculpted objects, or as in this exhibition in an imaginary Zoom meeting between the artist, and her three cats, Irving, Gladys and Julius and her dog Mango. The one work in the exhibition that incorporated leaving the studio and collaborating with other people is the work Mango Mango, an edition of cast pigmented paper made at the Brodsky Center at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Two artists proofs of the edition of 10, each unique, will be in the exhibition.

McEneaney has long made paintings of interiors with flat planes of bright colors, broken up by intricate areas of patterning and abstraction. A new element in this body of work is the addition of collage to the process. Her work often includes paintings within paintings, however here, she uses computer scans of her own paintings, on digital rice paper, which are then cropped and skewed to the appropriate proportions. She then goes back in repainting them and highlighting details. Also, there is now a greater sense of the paintings referring to each other, as views from one painting, appear as collage in another, and details such as book spines, pets, and furniture are sometimes added as collage. This new technique allows her to show the viewer the process, the sketching and drawing that happens along the way, and how the paintings are made in relation to one another, and to her own life. There is a layering that is physical with paint and collage and a layering that is an all-encompassing project by the artist.

McEneaney received a certificate of painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied at Philadelphia College of the Arts. She had major solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX and the ICA Philadelphia. She has had regular solo gallery exhibitions in New York since 2001 and Philadelphia since 1979. A survey exhibition was held in 2021 at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia and she was in the group exhibition Dear John at Adams and Ollman, in Portland, OR, also in 2021. McEneaney received a Purchase Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and has been awarded artist residencies at the Chinati Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans and the Ballinglen Art Center of County Mayo in Ireland. Her works are in the collections of the Minneapolis Museum of Art, Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, the Delaware Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.