Sarah Martin-Nuss: Pouring Water into Water

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Sarah Martin-Nuss

Pouring Water Into Water

July 11 - August 16, 2024

Opening Reception: Thursday, July 11, 6 - 8pm

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present Pouring Water into Water, Sarah Martin-Nuss’ first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from July 11 through August 16, 2024. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, July 11 from 6–8pm.

To look upon Martin-Nuss’ lyrical, crepuscular abstractions is to be conscious of constant transmutation – the unraveling of a ribbon of paint, the flicker of a speckle of oil pastel, the myriad of lines, marks, and colors in unceasing states of becoming. The consequence of pouring water into water is immeasurable – will it be a drop or a cascade? Will it create a ripple or a splash? Will it hurl and plunder like the tempests in Turner’s seascapes? In the same way, Martin-Nuss’ mark-making is a generative act of infinite variations. Each brushstroke is open-ended, emerging anew amidst various environments, colors, and textures, reimagining itself as it builds and transforms the worlds it enters. Like drops of water into a vessel, a single mark in her paintings simultaneously adds to and disappears into the canvas.

To borrow the language of the land, Martin-Nuss’ waterscapes are atypical ecosystems, mined from the artist’s memories of growing up on the Texas Gulf Coast, where marshes line coastal bays. Expansive passages of aqua and green are strewn with gestural scrawls of oil pastel, hinting of reeds in wetlands and the glassy, sun-dappled surface of still water. Martin-Nuss’ fascination with water originates in the distinctive environment of her hometown but is nurtured by the medium’s mutability and generative nature. Water is capable of hosting life on every scale, from microorganisms dwelling in shallow lagoons to marine megafauna. Martin-Nuss’ sweeping abstractions remind us, through expressive washes of smoky color and exquisite renderings of light, that there is no such thing as empty space.

The artist’s process of painting is often led by her hands, an approach she likens to choreography that animates the surface of her canvas. What follows is an iterative exercise of layering, flattening, erasing, and remaking, a method of activation through which landscape comes alive and painting takes on the labor of a living organism. The pulsing dynamism of Martin-Nuss’ abstractions can be felt particularly strongly in Are We Holding?, where richly-hued moments of calm are punctuated by bursts of feverish mark-making. Pale scratches of cross-hatched lines in the upper left corner evoke pixels and digital grids, alluding to landscapes beyond the physical.