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Sarah Stolar
Born 1974
Lives and works in San Francisco, USA
www.sarahstolar.com

Sarah Stolar is an interdisciplinary artist who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her focus is drawing and
painting, however she also works in multi-media installation, fi lm, video, and performance art.
The characters in Stolar’s work are borrowed from fairy tales, myths, and religious stories and are placed in
a turbulent landscape of abstraction, recalling storms, explosions, tornados, and other energetic surges.
Ultimately, these fi gures function as autobiographical metaphors. By interpreting herself as a mythic
heroine, for example, she is able to transform intense personal experiences, often dark and heavy-
hearted, into legendary narratives, in a cathartic effort to transform melancholia into beauty. This creation,
destruction, and restoration of emotive internal events is echoed in her painting process.
Heavily infl uenced by the tradition of great oil painting, Stolar fuses formal techniques with expressive,
gestural abstraction. The physical act of scraping out, reworking and repainting invokes a fl ow state, in
which she surrenders to the materials, and to the alchemical nature of oil paint. This layering, covering,
and revealing illuminates the intangible and highlights fl eeting thoughts, emotions, and stories that are
often unexplainable.

SARAH STOLAR received a BFA in Painting from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and a MFA in New Genres from the San
Francisco Art Institute, where she currently teaches. Stolar's work has been exhibited in many distinguished international
venues. Highlights include the Anti-Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland; Currents 2011, Santa Fe; the San Diego
Museum of the Living Artist; and the 53rd Venice Biennale. Most recently, Sarah presented her fi rst solo exhibition at the
Bohemian Gallery & Museum of Contemporary Art in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Top right: Bees, 2012, Oil on Canvas.
h: 127cm w: 102cm d: 5cm,
Artist’s Collection.
Top far right: Kali, 2011, Oil on Canvas.
h: 122cm w: 122cm d: 3cm,
Artist’s Collection.
Left (x2): Marriage Portrait, 2012,
Oil on Canvas.
h: 87cm w: 143cm d: 5cm,
Artist’s Collection.
Right: Queen of Hearts, 2012,
Oil on Canvas.
h: 180cm w: 165cm d: 5cm,
Artist’s Collection.
Far right: Siren, 2012, Oil on Canvas.
h: 130cm w: 122cm d: 5cm,
Artist’s Collection.
Next pages: Annunciation, 2012,
Oil on Canvas with Gold Leaf.
h: 122cm w: 244cm d: 5cm,
Artist’s Collection.

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