SARAH DWYER
6 - 9 September 2024 | Javits Center, New York | Booth P9
On the occasion of the 2024 edition of The Armory Show, Galerie Fabian Lang is delighted to present a solo booth with new works by Sarah Dwyer (b. 1974, Ireland, lives and works in London, UK). In her presentation, Dwyer creates a maze of new sculptures and paintings, inviting the public’s interaction by guiding the viewer through the space and engaging with the works that are on plinths, coming off the walls and creeping down onto the floor. Traditional exhibition roles between sculpture and paintings are subverted. Dwyer’s latest paintings move fluidly and inimitably between various languages of abstraction and figuration, creating an interstitial space between the two, at once definite and uncertain. A mixture of visceral markings, elemental shapes and gestural strokes, resting on multidimensional swathes of colour, coalesce into personalities, or amorphous, distorted limbs, heads or genitalia. Developed from life drawings, Dwyer reworks the figures on the canvas, over and over, editing them down, pushing and pulling the forms into shape. She is using her own abstract lexicon of mark making developed over a fifteen-year period, with a nod and a wink to the history of abstract figuration. She is taking the discourse she has developed in painting into experimental sculpture, using it in dialogue with the paintings and drawings, as in our presentation. The paintings surround a couple of multi-tiered plinths with a family of sculptures appearing to be precariously balanced on and off the plinths and the walls. Between figuration and abstraction, the relationship to the nature of the gestural sign and the line continues. The colourful sculptural works openly challenge traditional notions of monumentality and beauty. Bringing life drawing into her practice has allowed Dwyer, as she says, to recognise the vulnerability of her own body (and all our bodies) and what it means to be her, in an ever-changing female body that has at times had to go to war with itself.
