Sara Carter
Camden Nights
June 17 – July 29, 2023
(Los Angeles, CA) de boer is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Sara Carter, her second solo exhibition with the gallery. Carter’s paintings are influenced by moments of seeking solace from trauma and abuse experienced in her early adult life. Each painting is engaged and fueled by a journey of highly personal memories of Carter searching for peace. The resulting pictures aim to evoke the intangible. Fleeting events like the impression of a day in the park or the memory of returning to her childhood home in Camden, TX.
Carter begins each painting by carefully layering atmospheric and gestural marks on heavy linen canvas. The result is a complex balance of disruption giving voice to dramatic experiences and moments of time in specific places. Carter transforms the canvas into a laboratory that ponders darkness and misery equally with light and pleasure. Through the use of color, form, and texture Carter prompts all of the human emotions; tragedy, serenity, ecstasy, isolation, and despair culminating in a sense of indecision from the intimate frame of a canvas.
In Gramercy Park, 2022, Carter pairs moments of luminous color with sculptural order where the inherent chaos of translating the feeling of a place coalesces in balance with the artist’s memory. Achieved with masterful mixtures of oversized and small brushes, Carter constructs the foreground as a destination for gestural strokes. Throughout her paintings, Carter balances spontaneous actions with essential periods of observation, carefully considering her next mark. The emerging composition often is interlaced with pours and brushstrokes, creating textural depth that encourages the viewer to imagine its construction.
Sara Carter is a Houston-born abstract painter based in Austin, Texas. Carter studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s and remained in the Bay Area until 2017 when she moved to Austin. Carter sees the works as embodiments of her psychic state, emitting a ‘frequency’ that induces an energy vibration in sympathetic, attuned viewers. Sara Carter’s paintings have been exhibited at de boer, Los Angeles, CA; McLennon Pen Co. Gallery, Austin, TX; Edward Cella, Los Angeles, CA; di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA; Octavia Art Gallery, Houston, TX and New Orleans, LA; Graystone Gallery, San Francisco, CA; the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA; Aureus Contemporary, USA; Octavia Gallery, Bath, United Kingdom. They have been acquired by di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art; Black Stone Minerals Company, Houston, TX; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Commack Expansion, Commack, NY; and many other public, corporate, and private collections.