Sarah Buckner Les visiteurs du soir, 2024

Depicting a nude figure reclining on a bed, Sarah Buckner's Les visiteurs du soir combines art historical references and personal experience to forge a powerful image of a young woman's life. Drawing on the tradition of nude, including Titian's Venus of Urbino and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's many Odalisques, Buckner's depiction has the woman look out at the viewer with an uninhibited yet friendly gaze. A few figures seem to float around in the composition, blurred and phantom-like. The painting leaves open whether these are the visitors to whom the title refers, or perhaps other, real-life companions who have left the woman exhausted and sprawled on her sheets.

Sarah Buckner's work conjures numerous art historical and literary references that traverse Rococo symbolism, the subconscious and mythological manifestations. Buckner intuitively materializes innovative and wistful environments inhabited by the actors she depicts within multiple pictorial genres, such as landscape, portraiture, and allegorical painting, to reveal her inner world. A recurring motif in her work is the nubile female body, possessing the canvas with a sense of liberation and self-determination. This liberation enables Buckner to reposition her emancipated figures and release them to explore the boundaries and depths of the enigmatic, abstracted scenarios in which they appear.