Show Essay from Fractured Beauty by Anna Friedrich

Compared to her previous shows, Sarah Meyers Brent’s Fractured Beauty feels poignantly fragile. Gone are decisively layered abstractions with bold backdrops; gone is bright, celebratory dripping paint. The beauty here is indeed fractured, almost ambivalent. If the women in her paintings had faces, they would resemble those in Modigliani’s portraits: perfectly elegant and poised, yet precarious, touched by tragedy. However, they don’t, and we are left to guess what the fantastic floral explosions might conceal. Motherhood, perhaps, which is never easy; a frightening diagnosis; fear for the wounded environment; fear for her own wounded body. The note of ambivalence casts upon the show a new, for Brent, subtle veil.  

Art is a consolation to those broken by life, Van Gogh wrote, and first and foremost, to the artist herself. The new works, with their grounding yet ghostly vases (a new element for Brent), with pale, little faceless figures teetering off-balance, with dreamy, empty landscapes in unearthly colors almost palpably seek to soothe, to hold close, to whisper gentle endearments, to empathize. Compositions here seem to impart to us that, yes, life can be very, very difficult, and the artist has been through an ordeal, but she is still here, and she is healing, and she is painting again. 

 Brent employs a variety of materials and techniques. She recycles toys and household junk into delightful, funny sculptures; the flowers in her canvases are dried, live, artificial and imagined. She elegantly combines a permanent medium, acrylic, with transient charcoal. Her backgrounds no longer contrast boldly with the central shape but rather continue and flow out of it and then hug it gently in a soothing puddle of color (hence Pink Puddle and Pink Vase). It is true for almost all new compositions, especially Floating, the most touching and telling of the show’s paintings. If it could talk about itself, it would say this: High above the invisible ground hovers a vessel. We can see it, but not well. It contains a soul, a soul of an artist and a mother. That soul belongs both here on earth and in the realm of the sublime. Though not inhumanly strong, it is nonetheless harmoniously balanced through its lovely palette of mauves and grays, and because of that, it will definitely, most certainly endure.

Catalogue Text from the Primal Garden “Walter Feldman Fellowship” by Katherine French

 “Flowers are dangerous subjects for painters.  In the wrong hands, they are cloyingly sweet or blatantly sexual.  They recall a kind of feminine delicacy that belies tough-mindedness. They avoid swagger and strut.  We do not expect to be challenged by paintings that reference flowers, but artist Sarah Meyers Brent is quick to set us straight.  In her mysterious gardens of growth and decay, we see evidence of hard intellect.  There is nothing overly pretty about gnarled and twisted roots, or in the ooze of rotting plants.  But Brent transforms decomposing muck into a thing of beauty, convincing us of her ability to make paintings that are sublime.”….

 … “Brent invites viewers to a visionary garden, but then leads us past its deceptive tranquility to explore primal fear, anxiety, and joy—all the basic components of an emotional life that inspires us to look beyond ourselves.”