Sarah Awad’s paintings are large-scale and meditative—images that exude a sense of “place” and attitude, a timelessness as it were, even as they remain powerfully contemporary. Awad has chosen to paint gates and with that choice comes an entire visual history of compositional motifs involving the gate as metaphor to the unknown or simply a passage out of somewhere and into somewhere else. Awad’s paintings writhe and twist, yet within each of these beautifully rendered works is the kernel of form, breaking free from the surrounding abstraction. Desert Comfort is particularly arresting, simultaneously still and wild.

Diane Rosenstein Gallery
831 Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038
Gate Paintings
One view through Oct. 10, 2015