Sarah McEneaney’s paintings are autobiographical narratives. Working from drawings, memory, observation, imagination, and photographs, the artist creates detailed and highly coloured works that weave together personal experience and universal themes. From the mundane to the profound, these paintings chronicle the daily life of an artist actively engaged with the world – essentially, painting a life. Though direct and at times factual, the works read less as memoir and more as creative non-fiction. Scenes, moments, and details are carefully selected and edited with the same deliberation given to decisions of colour, line, and perspective.
A passionate traveller, McEneaney has participated in numerous artist residencies across the United States and abroad, documenting the experience of being and painting in new environments.
During a first visit to Ireland in 1995, the artist travelled by car and public transport, creating gouache-on-paper paintings along the way. In February and March of 2016, she was a fellow at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, painting the studio, living space, nearby landscapes, and even seaweed baths at Kilcullen’s in Enniscrone. In the summer of 2023, McEneaney was a resident artist at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, chronicling life and art-making in that remarkable setting – painting, eating, drinking, walking, and swimming in the company of Ariel, the resident cat, and a vibrant community of fellow artists, writers, and composers.
The works in Here and There bring together selections from the two Ireland residencies alongside paintings created in Philadelphia. Having lived and worked in the same building there for 46 years, Sarah McEneaney continues to draw inspiration from the familiar surroundings of the studio and home – a constant subject through which the paintings tell the story of a life well lived.
Bio
For decades, the life and art of Philadelphia based painter Sarah McEneaney have been symbiotic. McEneaney’s autobiographical subject matter presents an unpretentious approach to rendering people, places and things with vibrant, meticulous and detailed brushwork. Her paintings are an invitation into the story of a life lived.
Sarah McEneaney was born in Munich, Germany in 1955. She graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1979 and to this day lives, paints and commits herself to the community of Philadelphia.
McEneaney has had solo museum shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Mills College Art Museum, CA; and the List Gallery, Swarthmore College, PA. She has been in over seventy group shows throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and had consistent solo exhibitions in New York and Philadelphia over the last twenty years. McEneaney’s work is in the collections of Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA,The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. McEneaney has had artist residencies at Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans, the Chinati Foundation, Marfa TX, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY and the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Sarah McEneaney is represented by Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and Taymour Grahne Projects , Dubai.
Images: 01. Sarah McEneaney, Ballinglen Studio, 2016, Acrylic on yupo mounted on wood, 12.7 x 58.5cm, Image courtesy the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, Photography John Carlano.
02. Sarah McEneaney, Panel Prep Hearing, 2022, Acrylic and collage on wood, 122 x 183cm, Image courtesy the artist and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Photography John Carlano.
03. Sarah McEneaney, Pink Studio, 2024, Acrylic and collage on wood, 122 x 183cm, Image courtesy of the artist and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Photography John Carlano.
#HereAndThere
Instagram: @sarahmce
