Sally Kauffman
Washington , DC
Kauffman, a visual artist based in Washington, DC is best known for her abstract yet allusory large-scale paintings of crowds engaged in communal activities.
MessageKauffman, a visual artist based in Washington, DC, exhibits in local galleries and exhibition spaces including the Workhouse Arts Center, DCCAH, Studio Gallery, Athenaeum, The Clinical Center Art Program at NIH, McLean Project for the Arts, Schlesinger Art Center, Glen Echo Galleries, Touchstone, Hillyer, Zenith, Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Center, Studio 1469, Target Gallery. She is the recipient of Juror’s Awards from Anne Reeve of Glenstone and Marybeth Kelley of the Hirschhorn, the Linda and Douglas Scholarship from the Corcoran College of Art + Design, a merit-based artist grant from the Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency program and DCCAH fellowship and juried exhibition grants. Her work is in private and public collections; the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fine Art Acquisition Program and the Art and Healing Program/Inova Schar Cancer Institute. She is affiliated with Distinct Studios, Art Watch, DCAC, Washington Project for the Arts and Studio Gallery where she served on the Board of Directors. Kauffman earned a BFA from the University of Kansas and studied at the University of Texas and the Corcoran College of Art + Design.
Statement
I am best known for abstract yet allusory large-scale paintings. I work in series, painting groups of people swimming, sharing meals around a table, lounging and listening to music and protesting for civil and human rights. Recently I’m focused on groups of endangered or extinct species: bees and butterflies, big cats affected by border walls, birds and ocean creatures affected by the destruction of their habitat and climate change.
“My paintings exist in the space between abstraction and figuration where amorphous shapes and fluid color reflect my instinctive response to the world around me.”
A quote from a Mark Jenkins review in the Washington Post: “Local painter Sally Kauffman finds her footing in crowds. After the 2017 Women’s March, she produced vast, loosely gestural views of massed humanity. Those soft-detailed pictures verged on the abstract, yet were placed precisely in history by the scores of pink blurs that represented knit hats. Kauffman uses the same technique in “Jeopardy”…. often depicted are butterflies, whether as smears of vivid color in the eight-foot-wide “Border Crossing” or as dark shapes in a trio of gray-and-black pictures …. “Intercept” packs great-cat faces so tightly that muzzles and whiskers nearly fuse into a single organism, almost as hivelike as the teeming bees of “Transgression.”
I research and document my topics, often creating digital sketches, adding and subtracting images and manipulating the composition and intensity of color until I have a dense, saturated starting point for the paintings. Layers of transparent oil washes on canvas become the base for my gestural brushwork. I slowly build a fluid, vibrant surface that conveys both beauty and tension.