Marcia Wood Gallery Blog: Robert Sagerman

(detail of painting)

Current Solo Exhibition

January 24 - March 1, 2008

Robert Sagerman is based in New York; he exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, German and Atlanta, and has shown in gallery and museum exhibitions in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Chicago and Cleveland. Sagerman holds three master's degrees - in painting, art history, and religious studies - and is currently working toward his doctorate degree in Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University.

The titles of Sagerman's paintings derive from the number of applied daubs of paint that make up each work. His rigorous process involves the application of thousands of 'marks' of oil paint using dozens of colors he mixes and applies in thick, textural layers often resembling dense, three-dimensional materials like astroturf, mounds of confetti, candles, ribbon, textiles and so on. Sagerman laboriously builds the paintings mark by mark with a painstaking precision, resulting in a completely balanced array of colors to create a perfectly unified color-field. The final achievement is an energetic and fascinating work that radiates an imposing physical, spiritual and intellectual presence.

"My understanding of my own work has continued to develop over time," Sagerman describes in a recent statement, "and it is that shift in perception that has led to the changes that gradually make their way into the work itself. I have come to sense three distinct ways in which my work functions, all of which hand in a kind of balance reinforcing one another. First, there are the evocations that give the work its emotional weight, whether these involve landscape associations or naturalistic ones, relating to textures or to processes of growth. Second, there is that aspect that points not to the outside world but inwards, towards my own self. My fixation upon process - both in terms of my laborious method (apparent in the physical work itself) and my practice of numerical documentation - has helped me to concentrate on this meditative phase of the work, and has also served to highlight it for others. Lastly, there is an aspect of my work that points neither to the outside world nor to my own inner one but, as it seems to me, beyond either. It is with this final aspect that I time and again find the solutions to the conundrums that, for me at least, my work raises: There is a sense in which each painted work resonates as its own self, as a kind of being that partakes - paradoxically, given the sheer weight of each work's material substance - of a transcendent immateriality. So it is that painting for me is neither simply a reformulated and abstracted mode of landscape painting nor an exercise in tautological self-absorption. I return often to the feeling that my work for me is a calling into being of independent entities which partake of their own meaningful existence."