Diane Rosenstein Fine Art is pleased to announce The Women, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sarah Awad. The Women opens on Saturday, October 19th with a reception for the artist from 6:00 – 8:00 pm. This is Miss Awad’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and in Los Angeles.

Sarah Awad: The Women will present large-scale female nudes as well as landscape-based abstractions that embrace the inherent myths and mysteries of form. In these new paintings, Awad reconsiders the precepts of 1980s neo-expressionism and confronts our nostalgia for European glamour. The artist reawakens our detached assumptions about the transcendent purity of minimalism and -- in what becomes a return of  ‘The Return of the Figure’ -- continues a contemporary conversation with the work of Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas, and John Currin. The monumental paintings in The Women frequently present an illusory female nude – often in outline – which emerges then recedes from an abstract ground.  With both the nudes and several intimate landscapes, the artist employs an expressive palette and the power of scale to convey an unsentimental but fauvist sensuousness.

Sarah Awad (USA, b. 1981) received her BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2007), and an MFA from UCLA (2011). This year, her paintings were included in three important group shows: Rogue Wave '13 (15 Artists From Los Angeles) at L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA; First Anniversary Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture and Photographs at DRFA; and Paradox Maintenance Technicians at the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2013).  Sarah Awad lives and works in Los Angeles.