If you never believed a picture of hands intertwined with miscellaneous body parts would evoke emotion, Sarah Slappey is here to prove you wrong. Sarah is an incredibly talented artist born in Columbia, South Carolina who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City.
Her brilliant paintings feature surreal elements that will make your skin crawl while at the same time alluring you, drawing you closer into the frame. Both peculiar and beautiful, Slappey’s work takes familiar subjects like the human body and turns them into something wildly strange, something that will have you looking twice, unsure of what you might be seeing.
Art Maze Mag
Hands play a major role in all of Sarah’s artwork. Despite their prominence, she occasionally features other body parts of the female anatomy. Limbs, thighs, breasts, and disfigured nipples are noticeable in her recent works. Her work jars the senses, so why can’t we stop looking at it?
I believe the appeal it has lies in how relatable it is to the modern woman; beauty in chaos. The modern woman is a mix of so many things that are gorgeous but entangled within a mess.
The 36-year-old artist has a BA in Studio Art from Wake Forest University and an MFA from Hunter College. She states that for as long as she can remember she has been interested in finding and recreating a feeling of beauty mixed with repulsion. She is also a fan of horror movies.
Hands are known for being quite difficult to paint, but Sarah forges ahead and has perfected this difficult skill. Her work is being compared by some to that of the Mannerist master Jacopo da Pontormo, whose unusual, elongated figures shook up Renaissance Florence.
Sarah Slappey has a poignant lesson for all creatives. Her advice for newbies is to not be afraid to destroy something. During her interview with Art Maze Mag she revealed one of the painful truths she had to learn early on.
Don’t be afraid to destroy something. One of the most important paintings I ever made was in my first art class at Wake Forest with painter Page Laughlin. We had a few days to make a still life painting – the first assignment of the semester. I worked so hard on it. When they were completed, she asked everyone to stand in front of their painting, mix a hefty amount of black paint, and paint a huge “X” over it from corner to corner. It was so painful. But what it taught me is that if you’ve done something once, you can do it again. Don’t be afraid to wipe out, cover up, or destroy. A better painting will always be born from the ashes.
Sarah Slappey
Sarah Slappey is represented by Sargent’s Daughters Gallery and Maria Bernheim Gallery. In 2015, she was awarded a Kossak Painting Grant and a Hunter MFA award in Painting. You can attend her solo exhibition called Power Play. It will hold at Sargent’s Daughters Gallery, New York, NY. It will be on till the 22nd of March, 2020. See the details below.
Location: Sargent’s Daughters, 179 East Broadway
Price: Free
Time: Wednesday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.
What do you think of Sarah Slappey’s work? What emotion does it invoke in you? Let me know in the comments below.
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