Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain (b. 1979, Albany, NY) paints exuberant abstractions that often extend beyond the canvas into installations, site-specific painting, stained glass, and furniture that draw from sources as disparate as Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, and pop music, and incorporate materials as diverse as fabric, sand, feathers, jewelry, crystals, and ribbons.
Well known for her exuberant abstractions, Cain's (b. 1979, Albany, NY) practice often extends beyond the canvas into installations, site-specific painting, stained glass, and furniture. Her work draws from sources as disparate as Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, and pop music, and incorporates materials as diverse as fabric, sand, feathers, jewelry, crystals, and ribbons. At the Henry, the artist will create an immersive architectural intervention in dialogue with the double-height architecture of the museum’s East Gallery.
Cain’s painting, which she describes as “muscular, mostly gestural,” embraces a strategically intuitive power that both undermines and expands our expectations of what has been historically considered “serious” abstract painting. Her color-soaked palette mixes with a wide range of found objects that the artist adds to her compositions. In turn, these objects complement her titles, which shift in reference from the sweet and mystical, created out of magic from under a rock (2017), to the erotic, Peacocking (2019), to the political, Keep it Safe and Legal (2018). Cain redefines abstraction in feminist terms as an architecture for transformative, embodied, emotive experience. In this regard, her work has an explicit politics that emphatically insists on the value of feminine, queer, and other “othered” aesthetics, intentionally dismantling male-dominated art historical traditions.
At the beginning of her career, Cain made dozens of site-specific paintings in abandoned buildings. By nature, these were ephemeral works. As her practice evolved, she has continued to create massive site-specific works and preserved the impulse to treat painting seriously, but not preciously. More recently, her desire to create and reveal space has found an outlet in the creation of elaborate works in stained glass—an element that will be included in the Henry installation in addition to floor-to-floor wall paintings and touchable furniture. Often referencing lyrics from popular or particularly resonant songs, Cain has chosen the title Day after day on this beautiful stage, a line from the 1998 song We Are Real by the Silver Jews, for her exhibition at the Henry.