Alison Saar has developed a body of work consisting of sculptures, engravings and paintings focused mainly on black female identity in the United States. She was born into a family of artists–her father Richard Saar is a renowned ceramicist and the assemblages of her mother, Betye Saar, still active today, are now receiving international recognition. Over the last forty years, Alison Saar has built a unique corpus that is still little-known in Europe, consisting of sculptures and installations at the crossroads of diverse cultural influences (Afro-American culture, Haitian folklore, mythology or art brut).
For her prints, produced at the Tandem studio in Wisconsin since 2014, which are the focus of our exhibition, she mainly uses etchings on wood which offers strong contrasts, and she prints her works on paper but also on unusual materials such as handkerchiefs, tea towels and jute bags, giving her prints a surprising material intensity.
The works of Alison Saar are presented in many prestigious American museums such as the Metropolitan Museum, the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim and, of course, Studio Museum in Harlem.
Alison Saar was born in 1956 in Los Angeles where she lives and works today.
Press release courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Paris.
