RACHEL SAGER

Rachel Sager’s dynamic canvases focus on matter in transformation. Drawing on familiar, natural, yet abstracted imagery, Sager captures moments of dramatic, sometimes violent metamorphosis from one state to another. Her canvases also play with the notion of transfiguration, in the biblical sense, to explore the spiritual possibilities that might inhere in scenes of destruction. Her work—which evokes meteoric combustion, human-made explosions, the conflagrations brought about by climate change—speaks to the extreme intensity of the present moment. It might offer hope, despair, or both, depending on the vantage of the viewer.

Though Sager draws inspiration from the natural world—dust, light, smoke, embers, feathers, driftwood, water, and sand—her work is also undeniably in dialogue with the industrial detritus—plastic, glass, wire—disgorged by human life on Earth. In the relationship between these materials, these registers of existence, she finds conflict as well as moments of harmony, balance, or universality. These are indexed by bent and refracted light, crepuscular rays, dense clusters of pigment, crystal-like structures, or loosely repeating gestural forms—elements that combine to create a sense of vibrant, uncertain movement. Sager’s technique involves creating highly rendered, softly blended areas overlapped by bold marks of color and definitive strokes that make the work pulse and move with the viewer. The space of the canvas is highly worked over, yet a definitive take on what is "really" being represented remains just out of reach—it is meant to demand engagement.

Mystery is central to Sager’s work. She is interested in the way individual perception conditions the reception of visual imagery, and therefore the way any image can contain a multiplicity of meanings and truths. Her paintings invite introspection about interpretation itself, about what is felt versus what is known, and what takes place in the space between the two. These canvases work to challenge the very notion of what “is” — they are incandescent, rippling environments of pure flux. The viewer stands in a kind of blast radius as Sager’s ethereal canvases present us with a new way to confront the inseparability of beauty and brutality, life and death, humanity and the infinite.