Sarah Barker Brown

The Lives of Women…

“I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves” Mary Shelley

Sarah Barker Brown is a figurative painter whose focus is on the female body and within it the inner emotions as well as the exterior lives of women. Intimate moments, the depth of female friendships, the social dimensions of being a woman and celebrating sexuality, seduction and pleasure, all illuminated through a lens of nostalgia and tenderness. 

Her art can delve into clandestine feminine worlds, where women escape their everyday lives to explore their identities.

Utilising her formal painting education and design background she sketches intricately on paper before rapidly underpainting in acrylic on canvas, before layering in oil paint. Her process allows subjects and settings to evolve organically.

In some of these paintings (Summer of ‘76 & The Swimmers), the backgrounds are stripped out - emptied, unanchored to a particular place, space or time, her focus is solely and importantly on the people. Whether in solitude, caught in concentrated thoughtfulness, or the smile and easy, relaxed proximity to a friend, sitting outside with no other purpose than companionship and connection.

In the Legs series there is a focussing in on the body and, in contrast to the emptied out backgrounds, highly decorative dense layered ink transfer patterns created through stripping and peeling back the print, slowly revealing itself, the process both uncertain and fragile, mirroring our uncertain times. 

The Readers Wives Project is an on-going exploration of redefining representations of female sexual expression, freedom and pleasure. The source photographs appeared in men’s magazines in the 70’s and 80’s, sent in by the readers, and the project is a record of contemporary social, sexual and emotional lives expressed with a mixture of nostalgia, confrontation, pleasure and seduction. Ordinary women, often in everyday domesticity, slipping momentarily into a secret life to play with their identity. 

These are paintings of women of different ages and shapes depicted how they wished to be seen and brings to the fore multiple representations of female sexuality, ownership and enjoyment.  Through these celebratory paintings Barker Brown challenges the context of what female sexiness stereotypically looks like in the media in the 21st century. These are not polished women airbrushed into perfection, these are real women, proud of their bodies, glorying in their skin, bold, fun and playful.

Her new work in the series explores acts of reparation via the medium of oil paint, in order to reframe and relocate women’s identities to a place of sexual power, self-love and autonomy. Her paintings celebrate the search for fun and disregard of convention whilst unapologetically delving into the contradictions of liberal feminism. Exploring the hinterlands of emotional and sexual identity, she invites us to consider the hidden lives around the edges of what might be perceived as a more mundane existence.

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Sarah Barker Brown is a London-based artist with a degree in Classical studies, a training in Footwear Design from Cordwainers College and a previous life founding and running a successful footwear company. She is currently on turps Ogg-site Painting Programme 2023/4.

She graduated from the Art Academy with a First in Fine Art in 2017, where she studied under Tai Shan Shierenberg, winning the 2016 Kennerly Prize for Academic Excellence and 2015 United Society of Artists Bursary.

Recently her work has been selected for Fierce Scandal at The Lido Stores, Margate 2024, Every Woman Biennial London 2021, Discerning Eye 2020, 2019 and 2018, Society of Women Artists 2020, Beep International Painting Prize 2018 and The Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painting Prize 2020 where she won the Mantangi Prize. Summer of ‘76 was selected for stage 2 John Moores Painting Prize 2020 and her self-portrait was included in the Ruth Borchard Self portrait Prize 2017.

Co-curations include Hidden Worlds at Newington Gallery, London SE17 (2018) and Telling Tales in London N8 (2021).

Solo exhibitions include Private Lives as part of her Artist residency at BFC cafe, Crouch End, London, Life Stories and The Lives of Others at her studio as part of the Crouch End Open Studios in 2018 and 2019. She continues to show during the annual Art Trail.

Her up-coming group show is Here There Be Monsters at SafeHouse 1 in Peckham..

Her work is held in private collections both here and abroad.

She would love to hear from you - either DM her on instagram - sarahbarkerbrown - or send an email on the contact page. To keep up to date with her news, please sign up for the newsletter below.