SARAH KOGAN NIGHT SHADE ONLINE

Sarah Kogan is a British artist based in London and has recently been selected for a solo exhibition at the Project Space within the Bill Brown Creative Workshops at Churchill College, Cambridge. She will be working with Barry Phipps, Curator of Art and Science, at the University, to seek out relationships between her painting and contemporary science. The exhibition will include work from Kogan's Soma Series and will take place at the end of the summer 2025.

This online presentation of recent paintings, titled Night Shade, shows us the latest work from Kogan’s London studio. Paintings are typically made by pouring paint onto a flat horizontal surface, the paint then encouraged to move through suspension in water. This technique requires years of practice and knowledge of how pigment behaves in suspension, where temperature can also be a factor, and the seemingly chance outcomes are in effect predicted manifestations by the artist. In addition, a more gestural use of brush and paint is also deployed, with Kogan using her whole body to interact with the canvas and make marks, in one extended movement.

The paintings Three States of Matter (2024) and Cutspill ( 2024) employ a darkness of tone that evokes a visceral sense of elemental mystery, the former directly referring to the scientific term for the fundamental states of solid, liquid or gas. The works depict a series of hanging objects (a recurring motif in Kogan's work) of unknown origin that one might encounter in an interior world of dark woods or landscape and are conjured up with fluid, gestural marks, reminiscent of ink dispersed in water. These abstracted ideas are counter balanced by hard-edged, solid brightness of areas of white, which disrupt the space in the paintings and hint at an unseen world beyond (or possibly floating on) the surface. 

Everything Is Beautiful (2025) forms part of the Soma Series and is composed with a series of tubular, serpentine marks that form and unravel across the surface of the painting from somewhere beyond the frame of the canvas. It is both a literal reflection of how Kogan physically interacts with the canvas and an imagining of a series of conduits between the (unseen) brain and the rest of the body. 

Recent exhibitions include: Unnatural History, Tom Rowland, London ( 2024); Sarah Kogan: Warp, Karsten Schubert London (2022); Sarah Kogan: Take me to the Light, Karsten Schubert London (online, 2021); Sarah Kogan: From the Corner of my Eye, Karsten Schubert London (online, 2020); and Miniscule Venice (58th Venice Biennale, 2019). Recent curatorial projects include Supernova (Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London) and Space Shift (APT Gallery, London). From 2016–18 Kogan's multimedia First World War art installation Changing the Landscape was supported by public funding from The National Lottery through Arts Council of England and exhibited in four international and national venues including: Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Cogliandrino, Italy; The National Archives, UK; Atrium Gallery, London School of Economics and Manchester Central Library. Sarah Kogan has been a guest lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, The Estorick Collection and on the ground-breaking 'Art of Psychiatry' module at Bethlem Royal Hospital.