SARAH GILFILLAN

ECHOES

April 08 - May 06, 2023

Sarah Brook Gallery is pleased to announce Echoes, the debut solo exhibition of LA based artist Sarah Gilfillan. A series of thirteen paintings will be on view from April 8 – May 6, 2023. Gilfillan’s works present statue-like forms as conceptual vessels that encapsulate concrete ideas and evanescent affections. Rich, desert-inspired earth tones ground her compositions while encouraging slow and careful contemplation and reflection.

In this new body of work, Gilfillan mirrors the auditory power of Echoes in a series of visual compositions. As sound waves bounce from canyon walls to the canals of our ears, fading, distorting, and fascinating us, so too do these paintings examine how communication itself rumbles through our daily existence while ebbing and flowing between comprehension and misinterpretation. These works often incorporate hints of biomorphic forms suggesting human faces and body parts — such as the eye-like shapes in Muse or limbs in Sphinx. What do these eyes behold and what will these limbs embrace? When experienced together, these paintings perform an aesthetic choreography — the dancing traces of the painter’s marks glide, tap, stomp, sweep, and repeat, hinting at a codified visual language of pattern and bodily form.

In Figurehead a looming, central, statuesque-form balances on a pyramid base. With a smooth surface of deep umber browns, two arched shapes resembling petals enclose a central flat piece with a small oculus towards the top. To further emphasize its statue-like qualities, the bottom concave curve reflects a bright highlight recalling a bronze statue without the aged patina. Gilfillan completes the work with a shallow backdrop of deep mustards and goldenrods in loose watery brushstrokes, with the ‘sculpture' resting gently in the immediate foreground within a contrasting field of bright periwinkle. Here the viewer is invited to contemplate the Figurehead. Is it playing a largely symbolic role with little power or does it seek to wield its influence on the ruling party?

Sarah Gilfillan (b. 1989) is a Los Angeles-based painter working in abstraction. Originally from Central New York, she began her self-taught artistic practice while living in New York City. Gilfillan’s work draws inspiration from the forms of Dadaist Jean Arp, and rich subterranean tones derived from nature. In each painting, her instinctual compositions strike a balance between caprice and structure