UPCOMING EXHIBITION

WHEN THE CITY IS BUILT

Opens Wednesday 9 October at the Menier Gallery, London. 

Each painting, with its terse one-word title (e.g. Flightpath, Bridge) stands alone as a work of art. But together, also, they form a panorama of one day in the metropolis, as experienced by a handful of imagined people: a newly-landed Asian man comes in search of his granddaughter, who is nanny to a well-heeled architect, who is mother to a small child and a feckless teenager. The paintings veer from personal and intimate experiences to the public sphere: rooftop bars, business meetings, a supermarket check out, a passport queue.

‘There are different perspectives: someone seeing the city from the outside, someone involved in the building of it, and someone experiencing it as a situation she’s stuck inside.’

‘I’m not always painting literal, specific pockets of London. Often I’ve reshuffled the evidence a bit to reach an essence of a certain London experience - be it a building site, a check out, a man running down the street, a rainy day.'

‘Each painting leads me into different places and different thoughts. I start each day with buoyancy so I hope there is some tenderness in the paintings, some love, people helping each other.'

Sales: www.sarahokane.co.uk

Gallery: www.paintingsinhospitals.org.uk