Portrait of Sarah Miska by Maya Fuhr, 2023
Night Gallery is proud to announce the representation of the Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Miska. This partnership follows Miska’s 2022 debut Swept, and she will present her second exhibition with the gallery in July 2023.
Sarah Miska’s paintings are studies in material manipulation; contortions of hair, fabric, and ribbons are the focus of her unconventional equestrian motifs. Viewers are brought into an uncanny proximity to the regimented world of English horseback riding, effectively dissociating horses and riders to the point of mild obscenity. Meticulous linework and tight croppings invoke the formal rigor of Gnoli, an significant reference for Miska, while her close observations of horses’ movements, smells, and sounds enhance her ability to distill their essence. Line gives way to form in an optically pointillist conception of texture, at once capturing the discomfiture of close looking and the strange position of the voyeur. In all they reveal, Miska’s works suggest perfection to be a fool’s errand, the performance of class and bourgeois sport a site of immaculate perversity and unexpected humor.
Sarah Miska (b. 1983, Sacramento, CA) received her BFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2007 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York; Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Hernando’s Hideaway, Miami; and griff’s, Milwaukee. Miska’s work has been featured in group shows at Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles; Spazio Amanita, Los Angeles; Below Grand, New York; Dread Lounge, Los Angeles; Super Dutchess, New York; and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, among others. She is a 2022 subject of “In the Studio,” W Magazine’s culture series. Her work belongs in the permanent collections of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami and Long Museum, Shanghai. Miska lives and works in Los Angeles.