Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Recent Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Sarah Blaustein. This show marks her first solo exhibition with the gallery. Sarah Blaustein: Recent Paintings will be on view from May 5 through June 10, 2023.

Sarah Blaustein’s Vessel works are imbued with a distinctive focus on painting our innermost feelings, delving into the realms of creation, reflection, and blissful joy. Recent Paintings showcases a collection of twenty-two new works that survey the intricate nature of the inner vessel as a creative focal point. Blaustein seeks to explore the rich and complex interplay between the individual and the collective psyche, weaving a tapestry of emotions and thoughts that are at once deeply personal and universally resonant.

Through her lush, otherworldly paintings, Blaustein invites viewers to experience the immediacy, intimacy, and unmitigated humanity of her artistic expression. Blaustein utilizes acrylic, ink, and water on canvas to create her incandescent Vessel paintings. Her process is ritualistic and physical, involving the use of different rags, brooms, sponges, jugs, and brushes, as well as contemplative trips to and from her water source, all necessary in order to keep her canvases wet. As she commands bold, jewel-toned pigments and water, Blaustein decisively applies her medium with intention and authority, challenging herself to make these permanent marks without regret. Kinetic bands of vibrant color intertwine, bleeding and merging in a fluid dance that gives rise to sensuous forms of human scale. Her aqueous, scintillating canvases appear as if they are still wet, still in process, made complete by the viewer’s conscious perception and interaction. With a light touch and decisive strokes, Blaustein paints the sensations she feels but cannot hold, creating present-tense paintings where sensation and reflection converge in a kind of gestural embodiment.

Blaustein merges introspection with tactile expression, resulting in luminous paintings that deftly balance abstract forms and visceral depictions of the human experience. Her work pivots around the human form and its intricacies, an enduring focus that underscores her artistic philosophy. Her profound understanding of the body and self and their manifold significance is nothing short of transcendental, with a keen recognition that the inner vessel is forever in flux, endlessly generative and birthing, yet always anchored in the present. Blaustein’s painted Vessels are metaphysical worlds within themselves, and through them, Blaustein provides a transformative tool for the viewer to gain a deeper understanding of their own central emotions and present state of being.

Sarah Blaustein was born in 1982 and grew up in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design, the New York Studio School, the Art Students League of NY, and Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. Blaustein has exhibited her work at numerous galleries and museums, including Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, California; Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, New York; Prince Street Gallery, New York, New York; and Hackett Mill Gallery, San Francisco, California. Recent exhibitions include Sum of Sensations, a private viewing at PACE Gallery in Palo Alto for a salon event with Alexander Nemerov. In January of 2023, she showed a select body of work at a private salon hosted by Jennifer Stockman.Her concurrent show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, titled Present Tense, is on view until August 13, 2023. Sarah Blaustein currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.