Shifting images move within Sarah Faux's paintings like faces appear momentarily in drifting clouds. Within these sensual, gestural paintings, viewers slowly decode figures coupling and uncoupling, constructing and deconstructing themselves. In Faux's erotic world, power dynamics shift as fluidly as gender blurs. She crops her subjects to focus on specific body parts, a compositional strategy that pulls the audience into an intimate, first-person perspective. As Faux paints with colorful lines, pours, and scrapes, the boundaries of these bodies are never fixed, receding back into abstraction as quickly as they appear.
Sarah Faux (b. 1986, Boston, MA) received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2015 and a joint BA/BFA from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. She has held solo exhibitions at M+B (Los Angeles), Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai, China), and Stems Gallery (Brussels, Belgium), among others. Faux's work has been exhibited in group shows nationally and internationally, including at Loyal Gallery (Stockholm), Fredericks & Freiser (New York, NY), and How Art Museum (Shanghai, China). Faux was awarded the prestigious Gloucester Painting Prize and Residency at Yale, and she has participated in other residencies including Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, New York), Cuevas Tilleard Projects (Lamu, Kenya) and the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY). Her paintings have been written about in Cultured Magazine, i-D Vice, Surface Magazine, Modern Painters, The Wall Street Journal, Interview Magazine, Hyperallergic and Artsy, among others. Sarah Faux lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.