Sara Genn
Sara Genn was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1972. After studying at York House School in Vancouver, Genn completed her BFA at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario. She was awarded the British Columbia Scholarship in Visual Art and achieved the highest standing at the North American Advanced Placement Art Program. In 2003, after year-long sojourns in Paris and Seville, Genn relocated to New York.
“My paintings focus on formal elements, working to achieve perfect tonal balance, harmony and rhythm. The placement of equally intense colors achieves a lyrical pleasure, vibration, tension or halation. By reducing subject matter and external references, warm and cool associations can be explored along with motif, patterning, compositional movement and saturation. Exploring techniques for flats and voids, effects are achieved with paint viscosity through pouring, soaking and staining. The paintings toy with idea of textile or a worn and stretched work of craft, blurring the distinction between high art and craft, between the realms of domesticity and art-culture. As the painting’s scale grows closer to that of the viewer’s, it becomes its own environment, as it shrinks, it distances itself as an “other.” Scale can echo the dimensions of domestic objects created outside the realm of …
Sara Genn was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1972. After studying at York House School in Vancouver, Genn completed her BFA at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario. She was awarded the British Columbia Scholarship in Visual Art and achieved the highest standing at the North American Advanced Placement Art Program. In 2003, after year-long sojourns in Paris and Seville, Genn relocated to New York.
“My paintings focus on formal elements, working to achieve perfect tonal balance, harmony and rhythm. The placement of equally intense colors achieves a lyrical pleasure, vibration, tension or halation. By reducing subject matter and external references, warm and cool associations can be explored along with motif, patterning, compositional movement and saturation. Exploring techniques for flats and voids, effects are achieved with paint viscosity through pouring, soaking and staining. The paintings toy with idea of textile or a worn and stretched work of craft, blurring the distinction between high art and craft, between the realms of domesticity and art-culture. As the painting’s scale grows closer to that of the viewer’s, it becomes its own environment, as it shrinks, it distances itself as an “other.” Scale can echo the dimensions of domestic objects created outside the realm of high art, though these paintings hold themselves up in their practical uselessness. By functioning solely to serve as talismans for the emotions of the viewer, as objects of desire or contemplation, I devote myself to the task of making visible the invisible, creating totems to quiet rhythm, nothingness, continuity.”
Genn’s paintings have been featured on American billboards for Nissan Infiniti, The Toronto Arts Council, in film and television and in House and Home, NYLON Japan, Town and Country, W, Domino, American Art Collector, New York Magazine, LONY, and Tatler, as well as in the Rizzoli publication New York Parties; Private Views and for the Faberge Big Egg Hunt. Sara Genn is also a composer and independent recording artist, certified Gold in France and publishes a twice-weekly letter on art with over fifty thousand subscribers.
Courtesy of Voltz Clarke Gallery
