LOADED TIDES
SARAH TRIGG
JANUARY 26 - FEBRUARY 15, 2025
GAA COLOGNE
Gaa is pleased to present Loaded Tides. 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 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 Loaded Tides are Trigg’s most direct, fleeting but stable, flashes caught in motion.
Sarah Trigg (b. 1973) is a sculptor and painter whose practice has also included photography and writing. Her paintings and sculptures have been exhibited widely in New York and across the U.S., including at the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (NY), and the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, North Carolina). Since photographing and authoring her book STUDIO LIFE: Rituals, Collections, Tools, and Observations on the Artistic Practice (Princeton Architectural Press), her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Gaa, Cologne, Germany and Provincetown, MA; Black Ball Projects, Brooklyn, NY; New Jörg, Vienna, Austria; and ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA, among others. Trigg has recently been included in group exhibitions at 601Artspace, New York, NY and Gaa, Provincetown, MA, among others. Trigg has been a contributing photographer and writer for New York magazine’s art blog SEEN; a contributing editor for Modern Painters and ArtInfo.com; and a professor at the MFA Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Modern Painters, New York magazine, The Art Newspaper, Art and Auction, artnet, and The Brooklyn Rail. Trigg lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
