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@sarabirns

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Represented by @matt_careywilliams📍London

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@sarabirns

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This is my little shop window exhibition space. It’s on Porchester Place, just off Edgware Road in London. Cute, right? When I decided to go out on my own in July 2023, I anticipated staging only a handful of nomadic exhibitions. That changed when I took this space and began a programme of Scenes here (and Episodes elsewhere) in February 2024. This Thursday I open my 20th Scene with Graham Silveria Martin. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun. If business models aren’t malleable enough to accommodate ambition and change, then they’re not worth the envelope on which they’re written. I’ve taken my time with my curatorial project: made some space to think, build meaningful relationships with artists, collectors, curators and gallerists, and put together a terrific team. Now I’m ready to add another dimension to my project which offers more agency to artists and so, today, I couldn’t be prouder to announce my representation of Sara Birns, Lauren Brown and Dean Fox, and the co-representation of Nada Elkalaawy (with Gypsum Gallery in Cairo) and Theodore Ereira-Guyer (with Kutlesa Gallery in New York). This is a big moment in the evolution of my little enterprise. Building on my flexible presentation strategy, this additional agency will, likewise, be the result of my already deep engagement with the artists’ practices and the curatorial collaborations I’ve enjoyed with so many peers. Whether you label me a gallery, a project or just a shop-window, I want to remain nimble enough to present shows with many different artists; continue to lean towards those who are at the beginning of their artistic journey, whilst simultaneously devote more time to the artists I will now represent. And smile doing it. The art world paradigm fidgets endlessly and, today, I offer just another gentle itch of its structure. But one that fires up my huge excitement for the future of this little shop window, my team who look after it with me and the Scenes these five amazing artists - our artists - will put on there. We ready? We ready. Let’s do this … #artmarket #curatorialproject #artgallery #contemporaryart #londonartscene

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It’s been a month of goodbyes for me, but the hardest has been to my sweet cat bella. She has been an endless muse to me and many others, we were even models once! Sharing some pics of the work that she inspired, including the last drawings I made of her, when she had gone to sleep. Something so beautiful about drawing her one final time as a last goodbye.

I am so grateful to everyone who bought a piece that helped support her vet bills towards the end of her life xxx

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I am mummified with melancholy this morning because today is our last day living inside Sara Birns’ crazy, beautiful, magnificent head. My nineteenth scene, “Corn Maze” - and my second solo presentation with Sara - closes today at 5pm. Thank you to everyone who came to see her show at my space on Porchester Place and took the time to look, see and really digest Sara’s extraordinary work. That’s all the love we need to keeps these wheels spinning. I want to offer my enormous gratitude to the brilliant Mollie E. Barnes for her fantastic essay on this new body of work by Sara. A huge thank you is also due to Alexei Izmaylov of Showpickle for documenting Sara’s work and installation and to Callum Crawford and Russ McClintock for their superb portraits of Sara taken in her studio. The loudest shout out - as always - goes to Eilidh and Danele for making all this magic happen with such love and care. But my heart is saved for Sara: an artist who invites us to dive into what initially feels like a pool of goopy abjection and otherness, but has us happily splashing about in the wonderful weirdness she spins within minutes because, you know what, that quirk and strangeness, that repugnance and grotesquerie, that’s our new fucking normal now. All Sara does is tell us where the maze is (it’s right in front of our noses, by the way) so that all we have to do is turn up, tune in and drop the fuck out. The Corn Maze might bewilder us, it might even frighten us, but, during these dark, ugly times we’re all living in, it just might fucking save us. ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ closes today at 6pm. Come see. #contemporarypainting #artinlondon #creepybutthanks #contemporaryartist #sarabirns

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Yesterday began with a big hug from the wonderful Liberty Sinclair who came over to the gallery to see Sara Birns’ exhibition, ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’. Some of you may remember Libby as one of the artists in the first and final episodes of ‘The Big Deal with @stephlunch’. One of her delicate, winsome yet imposing paintings was the ‘top lot’ (for want of a better term) in the @filthyfoxauctionclub in Episode 1, consigned by the lovely @angelvintageinteriors and @aaronmorgans, whilst at the @affordableartfairuk in Episode 6, another fabulous painting sold within minutes of the fair opening on the go-getters, @spinola_888 and @darren_awol’s booth. Suffice to say Libby’s work captured a lot of attention before and during the show (when she had only just graduated with her BA from @cglartschool in London) and, now, that focus has only seasoned and expanded. There’s good reason for that swell of interest in her work. Libby continues to probe the evocative landscapes, both halcyon and hellish, conjured by the mists of myth or faerie tales. She harnesses its inchoate malleability and poetic fragility just so she can pick away at the status, dynamic and (re)presentation of the Feminine within such structures and traditions. Washy, almost aqueous grounds, coupled with her brisk, brushy, sometimes even bruising line, serve to offer gently humming planes that feel almost woven, or stitched, rather than painted. These are paintings that come with a delightful yet estranging blush of medieval antiquity, providing Libby with the distance she needs to ask why women must always been seen as either the object of desire to be won or the creature - be she human, feral, spiritual - destroyed by her own yearning for individual dimension and determination. There’s real texture to Libby’s work and, remarkably, she’s still only 24. If you would like to know more about Libby’s practice then drop her a DM or send her an email. There’s much to learn. There’s much more to love. #emergingart #emergingartist #painting #contemporarypainting #artistsstudio

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@sarabirns

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We are now in the final week of our latest exhibition at our space on Porchester Place, ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’. I’m already verklempt at the thought of saying goodbye to all of Sara’s wonderfully winsome little souls. The space will be open 10-6, Tuesday through Friday, and all are welcome. Come see. Portraits of Sara are by the wonderful Callum Crawford; all other photography is by the brilliant Alexei Izmaylov / Showpickle. #sarabirns #artinlondon #cornmaze #countyfair #artistsstudio

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One of the more deliciously darker paintings in my current exhibition - ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ - is a work called “Possessed by my Personality” which Sara painted whilst living in Poland between 2025 and 2026. It tingles in eldritch aberration as we join Sara and her partner, Adam, as they enter their apartment. Both bookend the composition so that the contrasting precision and illumination of their already quirky physiognomy acts like repoussoirs, drawing the viewer into a shadowy interior haunted by gossamer memories. These are the phantoms that possess Sara’s personality: originally sketched and thumb-nailed in the artist’s journals, these figures and forms are now let loose, tormenting and titillating subject and object with abject delight. These are the ghosts embedded in Sara’s own memories of county fairs or old apartments but they are joined by those ghosts of art history. At the top center of the composition we find the head of a swooning woman, adorned in Tudor head-dress, which Sara has purloined from Paul Delaroche’s decidedly camp description of “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” (1833, London, National Gallery). Below this head, at centre bottom, we encounter an intense, goblin-like imp, staring out of the pictorial space, ignoring the two apparently quibbling faeries that float close by. Sara has, again, turned to the annals of 19th-century art - both its devotion to a charged figurative fidelity and, now, to an ethereal eccentricity - by quoting Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”. A painting Dadd made between 1855 and 1864 whilst incarcerated in a lunatic asylum after murdering his father. As you do. The transformation of death and madness thus whistles through this peculiar scene; no one figure, face, space or place remains stable. Instead we are plunged into a metaphysical maze where plumes of ‘will’, ‘are’ and ‘was’ are isolated like existential smoke, only to then coalesce and perfume time, space, fact, fiction, desire and dimension with its delectable discombobulation. Genius. Come see. #contemporaryart #artinlondon #figurativepainting #painter #sarabirns

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✨Scene XIX: Sara Birns, ‘Corn Maze’ is on view @matt_careywilliams through 25 September✨

“…works touch on Freud’s idea of the uncanny: the strange disturbance produced when something deeply familiar returns in an altered form. His essay returns repeatedly to doubles, involuntary repetition, the doppelgänger, the evil eye and a disturbing uncertainty that is created when the self becomes unreliable.

This is part of Birns’s humour too.”
- excerpt from the essay by @mollieebarnes

📸 @showpickle

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My current exhibition with the wildly talented painter, Sara Birns, zooms us through corn mazes of the artist’s memory, from county fairs in California to shared apartments in Poland. Sara describes the particular ‘feeling’ of the American County Fair as something she could only ‘see’ after moving outside of it. After all, memories can only ever ebb into mind once experience has flowed away, and much of this show explores that transformation of familiarity into flashback into fiction and back again. “The Feelings of Feeling” (2025-26) was painted during Sara’s time in Poland, living with her partner, Adam. Both are depicted here (in parts, at least); their eyes squeezing out of their almost conjoined, etiolated heads like extruded toothpaste, staring simultaneously at each other and at the viewer. Sara has brewed her own physiognomy with quotations of Adam’s face, notably his mouth. Their union - in shared hybridity - thus speaks to that struggle for authenticity or a desire to be - and be seen - as separate from the crowd: challenges amplified by the conundrums and quest posed by being lost in the corn maze. Sara knows that a remembered face - signifying a time, place or feeling - is rarely preserved with neutrality. The resulting profiles are uncannily convincing because she understands how aggressively we read them. How much we, as the viewer, want to believe that these faces (and the feelings they provoke) are real, even as we know, deep down, they are not. Sara’s delectable suspension of disbelief is achieved not by experiencing a feeling but by stepping back and observing how that feeling is, could or should be felt, with such mesmerising, excruciating fidelity. Very clever. Very telling. My nineteenth Scene at Porchester Place, ‘Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ is open this week between Tuesday and Friday, 10-6. Come see. Portraits by Alexei Izmaylov and Callum Crawford. Studio shots by Danele Evans and Eilidh Watson. Most words (the ones that make sense) by Mollie E. Barnes. #artinlondon #contemporaryart #paintingtoday #contemporarypainter #artistsstudio

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In Sara Birns’ “Circle of Love” (2026), faces turn toward one another in a reverse clock face while the central figure looks outward, directly confronting the viewer. We are thus quietly folded into Sara’s circuit, simply by looking. This fabulous painting is the Ferris Wheel of Sara’s homage to the County Fair: faces are arranged around an implied rotation, each caught in the orbit of the others. Self the sun; otherness being planets of possible personality. There is something tender yet also unnervingly claustrophobic about this painting, as the faces inexorably become one communal organism, wearing the same shirt, sharing the same body and breasts. Sara here works with (and pushes the usual boundaries of) traditional structures such as compositional or perspectival diagonals, thirds, old master procedures and carefully rendered fabrics. Note how the folds of clothing echo the fleshy folds of the heads’ necks and jowls. This is yet another extraordinary painting by Sara that pleases the eye in order to destabilise it. We are seduced by the faculty of their sublime execution; by the faithfulness of their rendition only for each greasy wrinkle, bloodshot eye and crooked tooth to not just open doors of perception but also usher in those pixies of abjection that skewer sense in the most bewildering, brilliant way. ‘Scene XIX: Sara Birns, Corn Maze’ runs until Friday 25 September at my space on Porchester Place in London. Portrait by Callum Crawford. Words courtesy of Mollie E. Barnes. Come see. #artinlondon #contemporarypainting #figurativeart #theuncanny #sarabirns

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Episode 1 of The Bent Pod is out. Sara Birns - the first Bent Apprentice- on what painting actually feels like. Link in bio. 🎙️ available on apple and spotify

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