// Sarah Biggs

// Artist Biography

SARAH BIGGS (b. 1990, Ixopo, South Africa)

Sarah Biggs received her BFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT) in 2013 and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. 

Working primarily with oils on canvas and sized paper, Biggs applies her paint in thinned down layers of translucent colour, allowing her fluid marks and surfaces to shift and settle organically over time. Her work is characterised by an ongoing interest in the relationship between her painterly subjects and the natural world, tracing encounters beyond just the physical and the visual, but also the ways in which other senses, real and imagined, are woven into our experience of our surroundings. Through painting, Biggs finds ”a way of seeing in which there is space for the invisible forces that move the world" (Allende, 1991).

Her work is characterised by an ongoing interest in the relationship between her painterly subjects and the natural world, tracing encounters beyond just the visual, but also the ways in which other senses, real and imagined, are woven into our experience of our surroundings. Through painting, Biggs finds "a way of seeing in which there is space for the invisible forces that move the world.

Biggs applies her paint in thinned down layers of translucent colour, allowing her fluid marks and surfaces to shift and settle organically over time. Her scapes often sit on the edge between figurative landscape and abstracted colour field, seeking to capture the constantly shifting nature of the outside world as one moves through it. Painting exists as a threshold between these realities; a portal to the world to which her figures belong.

Sarah graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2013 and has since exhibited on a number of local group shows and fairs. She has held three solo shows at the Barnard Gallery in Cape Town. 'Further Afield' was presented in 2015, followed in 2017 by 'Waiting for rain', and most recently, 'Gathering dust' in 2019.

In 2015 she was awarded the TASA Emerging Artist Award. Presented by the Turbine Art Fair and the Sylt Foundation, this award took the form of a one-month residency at the Foundation’s headquarters on the island of Sylt, Germany and a one-month residency at the Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, Germany.

Selected group exhibitions include 'Ocular’ (131 A Gallery, 2020), Wildflowers (Salon91 Contemporary Art Collection, 2019), New Romantics (Barnard Gallery, 2018), A Piece of Work (David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, 2017), Fluid: Perspectives in Paint (Barnard Gallery, 2017), Surface: Emerging Painters (Barnard Gallery, 2015), Distance, a two-person exhibition (Salon91 Contemporary Art Collection, 2014), and Do-it, a project curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Michaelis Galleries, 2014). Her work was presented by Barnard Gallery at the Cape Town Art Fair (2015-2020) and AKAA (Also Known As Africa) in Paris (2017, 2018), and in 2016 she had a solo booth at the Turbine Art Fair.

1 Isabel Allende, ‘The Shaman and the Infidel’ (1991)