Collected Signals
Sarah Trigg
August 30, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Gaa Cologne
Gaa is pleased to present Collected Signals, Sarah Trigg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Trigg’s new works on paper are a departure from her large-scale canvas paintings, with dynamic works that feature loose, gestural brushstrokes. The exhibition focuses on a grid of framed works on paper taken from Trigg’s most recent series, in which Trigg continues her exploration of the subconscious reaching consciousness. Trigg is primarily a sculptor and painter, while her practice also extends into investigations of other artists’ studio practices through writing and photography as in her book, STUDIO LIFE: Rituals, Collections, Tools and Observations on the Artistic Practice (Princeton Architectural Press).
By way of dynamic and gestural mark-making, Trigg captures snapshots of matter suspended in a fast-moving formation. Undulating lines trace the movements of mutable bodily forms, while fleshy tones crawl across blush and teal backgrounds. Ultramarine works find rest with a drone-like meditation, an exhale.
Trigg’s new works retain her distinct palette of gem hues and lush, bodily toned pigments; pale greens, earthy browns, and rich, ruby tones feature prominently throughout. Finely-crushed volcanic rock (pumice) and pulverized quartz (silica) are the base for her pigments and provide density, allowing the fast movement of each brushstroke to be made visible. Volcanic materials nod to an explosion and surfacing of internal worlds, the psyche rising to be released and reckoned with. Trigg sees thought as a physical substance that we can reshape individually and collectively, not unlike the tumbling of an avalanche down a mountain or the swelling of waves on the horizon—her brushstrokes suggest a transformation is underway.
Willem de Kooning wrote that “Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, like a flash. It’s very tiny— very tiny, content.” To Trigg, an artist is one who is able to catch impressions of another world, moments that are brief in time but large in magnitude. The artist goes where science cannot, not to the spiritual, but to dimensions we cannot see with our current tools. The works displayed in Collected Signals are Trigg’s most direct, fleeting but stable, flashes caught in motion.
