Sarah Cain | |
---|---|
Born |
Albany, New York, U.S. |
February 3, 1979
Nationality | American |
Education |
San Francisco Art Institute University of California, Berkeley |
Known for | Painting |
Sarah Cain (born February 3, 1979) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Cain was born in Albany, New York, and moved to California in 1997 to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her BFA in 2001. She went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley receiving her MFA in studio art and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. In Tara McDowell's 2006 essay accompanying Cain's SECA Award, the SFMOMA curator wrote, "For Cain, abstraction has the singular capability to convey meaning outside of words: a feeling, a state of mind, a relationship to something or someone."
In March 2015, comedian and podcast host Marc Maron announced that he and Cain were in a relationship. Cain's second solo show at the Honor Fraser Gallery, "Bow Down," featured a large, abstract painting that Cain titled, "For Marc."
The paintings and installations of Sarah Cain employ a variety of materials including traditional canvas, stretcher bars, and paint, but also introducing unusual and poetic artifacts: from musical notations to leaves and branches, expanding outside of the two-dimensional plane of the canvas and into the surrounding environment, creating many site-specific installations. Critic Quinn Latimer in describing Cain's work writes "They court seemingly bad ideas — drawings sport feathers and doilies; installations feature eggs and hippy art teacher-like fabric swatches — and then transform them so deftly into serious painting that it can take a minute to understand what you’re looking at." In 2011, Cain collaborated with noted Beat-era artist George Herms at the Orange County Museum of Art, where the curator Sarah Bancroft wrote for the accompanying catalog that the two artists share "an interest in language and a frustration over its limits in describing abstract work"
Los Angeles County Museum of Art