SARA BERMAN

(b.1975)

BIOGRAPHY

Aiming to reflect our current times while incorporating historical influences, Berman’s practice addresses the personal, the political, the celebration, and the horrors of being who we are as individuals in this moment of our collective history. Berman’s enigmatic paintings raise questions about the authenticity of images and the self and challenges conventional notions of identity, gender, and representation. Berman is an artist exploring both inwards and outwards, excavating her past while absorbing new experiences and memories of the world around her.

To Berman, painting is a game of materiality. Bright oil stains of neon pinks and incandescent orange seem to pulsate and gradually appear from underneath shadowy swathes of rich greens and petrol blues. Through the visceral qualities of paint Berman’s physical process of scraping, wiping, smudging and brushing creates an almost bruised like quality to the paintings surface. The characters emerge from the violence of their own making, exerting a power and inner strength, holding your gaze or back turned as if in silent contemplation.

Berman is influenced by the way in which the female body is held by clothing, both as a space to occupy and as a societal construct. Her understanding of cloth and textiles as well as a deep fascination with clothing as an inhabited space is very much embedded in Berman’s practice. Berman’s use of costumes and props in her paintings blur the line between reality and fiction. By taking on various personas and dissecting the role of the artist as a creator, her work invites viewers to consider the multiple facets of human existence and the ever-shifting nature of identity. This roleplay of character and personas also removes Berman from the sense of self-portraiture within the work, instead creating paintings that feel more abstracted from herself.

Sara Berman was born in 1975 in the UK, and lives and works in London. She studied fashion (BA) at Central Saint Martins in the 1990s and worked in fashion before studying for her MFA at Slade UCL in 2016. Recent exhibitions include Lapdogs and Fools, Vielmetter, Los Angeles (2024); Home is where the Art is, De Kunsthal, Rotterdam (2022); Like there is hope and I can dream of another world, Hospital Rooms in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth, Hauser & Wirth, London, UK (2022); Summer Exhibition 2021, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2021); No Visible Means of Support, Kristin Hjellegerde (2021). Berman’s work can be found in the collection of The House of KOKO, London; The Poort Visser collection, Netherlands; The Maison Estelle, London, UK; The RO2 Art Collection and the Montparnasse Collection, Canada.

“My work deals directly with my experience as a woman and the roles I play within what I perceive as the existing societal constructs... Beneath all my paintings is the trope of the Harlequin as played by a woman. Tradition has this as a male role with the harlequin as a jester, a joker, a lovable rouge. When played by a woman, she is given the role of the Trickster Whore and has no agency. This is the backdrop against which all my paintings are made. I obliterate the Trickster Whore with paint and allow an ‘acceptable’ version of myself to hide the Trickster Whore.”

WHERE MUSES DARE, 2025

THE BODY ELECTRIC (GROUP EXHIBITION), 2024