Sarah Faux
Biography
Sarah Faux (b. 1986, Boston, MA) is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work navigates the boundary between figuration and abstraction. She earned an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2015 and holds a joint BA/BFA from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Faux has received numerous awards and residencies, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2023), an Institute Residential Fellowship at the Clyfford Still Museum (2024), and two residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs.
Faux’s paintings are deeply sensual, embracing themes of autonomy, pleasure, and the complexity of the feminized body. Her fluid compositions often begin as abstractions, with luminous fields of colour and quick, writhing lines that gradually reveal bodily forms—a resting hand, a watchful eye. Working from a first-person perspective, Faux extends the time between perception and recognition, inviting viewers into a tactile, emotional world influenced by feminist painters like Joan Semmel and Luchita Hurtado.
She has held solo exhibitions at Hales Gallery (New York), M+B (Los Angeles), Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai), and Stems Gallery (Brussels), and participated in group shows at Sim Smith (London), Loyal Gallery (Stockholm), and Althius Hofland (Amsterdam). Faux’s work has been widely recognised in publications such as Cultured Magazine, Artsy, Hyperallergic, and The Wall Street Journal. Through her explorations of intimacy and embodiment, Faux contributes to a contemporary discourse on identity, gender, and the sensorial experience of painting.