NEW YORK, NY.- The gallery announced a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Sarah Trigg. It is the gallery’s first exhibition with the artist and includes five large paintings inspired by psychological transformation, earth-related events, and the action of making a painting. A selection of related ceramic sculptures will be installed.
Trigg’s abstract paintings express a dense and uncontained momentum of brilliant and muted color and textures that range from plastic to geological. Her abstract practice is rooted in the materiality of the land, its movements, and their relationship to the physical aspects of pouring, brushing, and scraping paint along broad planes of canvas. As Trigg conveys, “In the paintings, the mark making resembles that made by earth formations but in suspension with multiple gravitational pulls—such as shifting planes of lava pouring, tides flowing, surfaces cracking, and tectonic plates shifting.”
Her paintings call to mind the physicality and spontaneity of 1950s action painting, the landscape interventions of 1970s earthworks, as well as feminist critiques of color and space such as Judy Chicago’s Atmospheres of colored smoke and Lynda Benglis’s poured Fallen Paintings of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Volcanoes are an important point of reference for Trigg, with their mutable, transformative quality, and symbolic connection to women’s power.
The artist’s process involves painting an initial background of chaotic brushwork in two colors and then adding subsequent layers of paint atop each other with each layer responding to the one below it. She works on the floor, adding paint to the canvas from all sides. The result of her process is a densely textured, sculptural surface on which paint appears to hover close to the viewer and push out to all sides rather than recede back into an atmosphere.
The artist’s sculptures, on the other hand, are smaller in scale and more contained in feel. They reference early forms of housing, geological core samples, and time. Hand made in ceramic, they continue the artist’s exploration of color, form and materiality, here in clay, a material also derived from the earth.
Sarah Trigg was born in 1973 in Appleton, WI and lives and works in Queens, NY. She received a BFA in Fine Art from Cornell University in 1995. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Loaded Tides’, 2025, and ‘Collected Signals’, 2024, at Gaa Gallery, Cologne, Germany; ‘Edges of the Sea Change,’ 2022, Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA; and ‘Territorial Expansion of the Innermost Continent,’ Black Ball Projects, 2019, Brooklyn, NY. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY, Black Ball Projects, Brooklyn, NY, and Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA, among others. Trigg is a 2024 recipient of the Tallichet Freedman Foundation grant. Her work has been discussed in Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Magazine, The New York Times, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications. She is the author of Studio Life: Rituals, Collections, Tools, and Observations on the Artistic Process, published by Princeton Architectural Press, September 2013.
