Sarah Lederman’s career launched when she was chosen by world famous art collector, Kay Saatchi and curator Catriona Warren in 2008 for Saatchi’s famous ‘Anticipation’ exhibition as one of London’s most promising recent graduates and as an “Artists to Watch”. Since then Lederman’s work has been hotly in demand, with a long list of art prize nominations including the Sovereign European Art Prize, the Jerwood Painting Prize 2009, the London Open 2009, and winner of the Catlin Art Prize in 2009. This May her first ever London solo show will open at ROLLO Contemporary Art with a collection of new paintings, before the artist returns to further education, on the prestigious Masters programme at Goldsmith’s College School of Art, London.
Lederman has previously exhibited at ROLLO Contemporary Art in a group exhibition alongside world famous artists, Tracey Emin and Cecily Brown, in the UK travelling exhibition The Body in Women’s Art Now, which surveyed the ground breaking women’s art of the last decade that focuses on the body. Her paintings have also been exhibited in the US and Finland and are represented in many prestigious collections including David Roberts’ Art collection, The New Hall Art Collection and the University of Arts Collection.
Lederman’s immediately recognizable paintings, rendered using watered down oil paint to create drippy images of doll-like female figures with barely-there pale bodies, blood red nipples and haunting dark eyes, explore adolescent desire, awkwardness and notions of ‘otherness’.
Strongly influenced by childhood fantasies, fairytales and the loss of innocence, Sarah Lederman’s paintings focus on the adolescent body as a site of flux to engage with and disrupt traditional representations ideal femininity as neat, pretty and contained. Rather, Lederman exploits the materiality of paint to create nudes in drippy oils that re-present the female body as a site of freedom and fluidity.
Lederman has said ‘I use paint to conjure the illusion of skin and containment in the body. For me paint is a way of building up cells and filth to allude to the surface of the skin. My painting makes the disgusting and repulsive become beautiful. The containable becomes uncontainable. The body becomes fluid, unfixed.’
Lederman’s haunting female characters resist easy definition; teetering between provocation and vulnerability. Her latest body of work, which will be launched in her solo show at ROLLO includes figures in water and centre around the idea of the Siren.
Sarah Lederman was born in London in 1986. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2008. She currently lives and works in London.
Image: Sarah Lederman, Two Legs Up in the Air, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 120 x 100 cm, image courtesy of the artist and ROLLO Contemporary Art.
Sarah Lederman
A Notion of Longing
18th May – 30th June 2012
ROLLO Contemporary Art, 51 Cleveland Street, London W1T 4JH