Sara Suppan

Sara Suppan (b. 1994) is a painter living in Minneapolis. She has recently had solo shows with Primary (Miami), Micki Meng (San Francisco), Moosey (United Kingdom), and Weinstein Hammons (Minneapolis). She has participated in group exhibitions with Hashimoto Contemporary (New York, San Francisco), Kutlesa (Switzerland), and Huxley-Parlour (London), among others. Sara has displayed at the NADA Miami, Untitled Miami, and CAN Ibiza art fairs with Micki Meng, Huxley-Parlour, and Moosey, respectively. She was a resident artist at Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria, 2019) and Moosey (United Kingdom, 2023), has been published twice in New American Paintings magazine (no. 155 and 173), and has received multiple grants for her work. Sara received her BFA in painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2015.

"I think about my paintings giving a little handwave, or a hello. They’re friendly. And they’re not flashy. Through subjects strange and specific, plain and contemporary, they invite new consideration of humble stuff. Many of my recent paintings are essentially portraits of objects— goofy things painted lovingly and using the conventions of still-life. A banana in the back pocket of some jeans, a paper airplane crashed into a bush, a line of ants marching across a book; all made lush in bright oil colors. Others of my work are what I call “good paintings of bad drawings”: a frowny face keyed into a car, for example, or doodly flowers sketched out on crumpled paper, contrasting realism with graphic flatness.

All of my paintings depend on beauty being undercut by a crude or sloppy element. High status is conferred by the tradition of oil painting and by the hours of labor implied, but the subject pushes against that status. I generally choose everyday things taken
directly from my Midwestern home and re-invistigate them through close cropping or by a particular arrangement. In this way, the tone of these paintings is kept a little askance, just skating the edge of sincere and funny. All ability and attention and technique in the
service of making something fundamentally stupid, and good".