Sarah Dwyer: Clatter.....THUD
Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present Clatter.....THUD, an exhibition of new paintings by UK-based Irish artist Sarah Dwyer. The artist’s third solo show with the gallery introduces figurative abstractions that grapple with the ever-changing body and the physical manifestation of the psyche. Canvases thrum with a freewheeling, helter-skelter conversation between familiar forms, worked and reworked tirelessly by Dwyer. The artist’s intuitive use of color takes on a presence and character of its own, a masterful counterpoint to the rhythm of gesture and line. Woven throughout the narrative fabric of each piece, Dwyer tells stories drawn from her own life, poetry, Jungian archetypes, and literary influences.
With a wink and a wry smile, “Clatter.....THUD” attempts to vocalize the frenetic, dramatic, and off-kilter intensity found within Dwyer’s paintings. Lyrical lines collide with anthropomorphic forms, layers of multidimensional color underpinning the interplay. Feet-like shapes boldly jut across Dwyer’s compositions, punctuating a staccato cadence throughout the new works. The figure itself becomes an expressive device in Clatter.....THUD, moving and contorting like a boxer, dancing and jabbing in front of the canvas.
In her most recent work, life drawing anchors Dwyer’s practice. The conversation between the figure and the artist’s hand evolves through the seams, creases, and cracks of flesh, and the weight, line, and form of the corresponding marks. Exploratory and dynamic, Dwyer wields drawing as a method of processing her own relationship with the body and confronting the experiences of which the body keeps score. In performing the body’s expansion and contraction, growth, loss, and change, life drawing becomes a tripartite act of survival, celebration, and achievement.
Disjointed body parts, sometimes grotesque, sometimes embryonic, dialogue with one another throughout the paintings. Within Verdant Tangle (2022), what could appear to be legs, a torso, breasts, and hair are fragmented and reoriented. The distorted figures, assertive limbs, and confrontational appendages live in the space where truth and invention merge. The background blocks of color reveal brilliant layers of complementary hues which vibrate with energy.
This exhibition affirms Dwyer’s stylistic shift from ethereal and light, to figurations that sit more prominently in the frame. The transformation speaks to the weight of life experience that accumulates with time, and the distinctly female burden that Dwyer describes as “carrying it with you on both your hips and your shoulders.” In Clatter.....THUD, Dwyer positions the body as a complex locus of joy, pain, loss, entrapment, terror, and triumph, and invites viewers to honor these myriad dimensions of embodiment.
