Sarah Mikenis: A New Season

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is happy to announce A New Season, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Sarah Mikenis. For her second solo exhibition with our gallery, Mikenis will show a suite of seven new gradient paintings in our Project Room. This body of work is tied to her recent experience with pregnancy and motherhood – and what she describes as a new season in her life. 

The artist writes, “While the sculptural forms of my paintings have become more physical, more dynamic, more forceful – the surface painting is kind of the opposite, focused on slow reflection, stillness, and beauty. The surface painting/color is loosely based on skies – observed, found, or imagined. I’m thinking about the sky, light, times of day (particularly transitional times like early morning and late evening). I build depth of color in the paintings with many layers of thin, transparent oil paint.” 

Sarah Mikenis (USA, b. 1986) makes sculptural paintings, manipulating canvas to suggest an interaction between body and textile, offering a Baroque sensibility to geometric abstraction. Her recent work employs gradients of color and considers the conflict between the surface of a composition and its form. The artist’s Venice Paintings were presented in Shelter From the Storm, a three-artist exhibition in 2022, and in a solo, New Paintings (2019), both at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Sarah Mikenis received her BA from Lehigh University (2008); Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2009); was an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (2015); then received her MFA from University of Oregon, Eugene (2016). Her paintings were included in New American Paintings #133 (Juried by Rita Gonzalez), 2018. She is from Portland, Oregon and lives and works in Brooklyn.