Sesame is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Sarah Harvey, an artist whose unmistakeable use of colour and fluidity has seen her profile grow exponentially since her graduation in 2004.
Sarah’s work is an unusual kind of portraiture, focusing on the body refracted by water. Her ability to capture the way light interacts with liquid and abstracts her figures gives her paintings a thoroughly immersive quality, like pools to be dived into. These paintings are engaging, enticing, refreshing and exciting.
The works in this series are based on a recent trip to Australia and adventures on the Rotnest Island reef near Perth. As ever with Sarah’s paintings, they combine a stunning visual aesthetic with very frank and personal content, striking a subtle balance between impact and emotional sincerity.
Through her focus on the body in water, Sarah uses the liquid as a kind of removed or “other” space to explore deep emotional relationships of her subjects. Mirrored within their liquid context, the figures become abstracted and disjointed, yet remain at the same time fluid and beautiful, a looser emotional construct of their physical, actual selves. It is this command of her medium and the ability such emotional ideas with sincerity and beauty that give Sarah Harvey’s work its unmistakeable quality.
