Sarah Treharne is an artist currently working in Pennsylvania to complete her MFA. Her charming and quirky portraits are both personal reflections and commentaries on her place in the history of painting.
Her figures are both clothed in and surrounded by loud, freely painted patterns. Her dense florals and wobbly tiles create an unreal world where colour is highly saturated and perspective is pushed and pulled to her whims. Each surface is filled with excess, an excess of colour, pattern, humour, and desire. Her characters are honest, relatable, and real, such as in “Glad Rags for an Ass that Won’t Fit (Quit)” where soft hips flow over the seat of a chair. Other characters are not real at all. Plastic and inflatable dolls recline in iconic venus poses, an idealized beauty that Treharne transforms into something comedic. Several of her titles further poke fun at their references. "Girl on girl tumblr: Spring Break" portrays Grande Odalisque lying besides an inflatable doll. Others reveal mundane, intimate moments of her life, also laced with irony, such as "New Year, New Me" which features her subject lying facedown on a bed, seemingly defeated.
Sarah Treharne creates figurative paintings that question the history of figurative painting itself by exaggerating the gaudy, the unglamorous, and inappropriate that often appears in that history. We love her vibrant, clever, and fearless work and can't wait to see where she takes it next!
