Diane Rosenstein is pleased to announce Gate Paintings, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Awad. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. 

Sarah Awad re-examines the traditions of art history, and like her previous series of female nudes, these “gate” paintings are a meditation on the epic tradition of decorative patterns in painting. Without fully escaping the act of ‘drawing’ in painting, her energetic and gestural works are also a compelling argument for the power of form and edge.

Sarah Awad: Gate Paintings deploy architectural and compositional motifs of both ornamental and metaphoric gates as points of entry into the picture plane.  Awad here constructs a compelling formal substitute for ‘the figure’: her gate paintings (some with literal references and some abstracted) expand our field of vision, inviting the viewer to look at and look through simultaneously. This new series of abstract compositions is a distinct progression in the painting concerns Awad has been working with for the past two years: how to create a new kind of space in a painting, through the negotiation of color, line and form.