Sarah Cromarty
Born 1980 in Winterhaven (FL), lives Los Angeles (CA)

Sarah Cromarty's painting practice involves acts of re-appropriation, defacement and recreation. The foundation of her work is the landscape paintings acquired at second-hand stores as merchandise that then undergo transformations via the artist’s hand such as remounting, cutting, scraping, gluing, collage, varnishing, and the subtle additions of color. Through such interventions the paintings go through a dramatic recreation, one that displaces traditional notions of figure/ground relationships, the authentic and the copy, as well as painting and sculpture. By playing with these formal codes, Cromarty is akin to other contemporary painters such as Peter Doig, Michael Raedecker or Dexter Dalwood as she opens up a visual place in painting that obeys the rules of an "imaginative space".

Cromarty's work is painstakingly produced with a sensibility that does not shy away from the painterly virtuosity that makes for special effects of surface qualities. Her psychologically charged paintings continue to challenge and compel viewers in ways that are strange, striking, and beautiful.

The 19th century romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich is powerful influence on Cromarty's work. Both artists are equally involved in creating sublime depictions of the landscape,that are eerily cinematic by today's standards. Perhaps, alongside her contemporaries, she has taken up the challenge Gerhard Richter wrote down in a letter less than a generation ago, "A painting by Casper David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted."