I paint small scenes, small theatres, where I combine architecture and figures. These constructed spaces become playgrounds of potentialities in which different forces can be made visible: desire, power, density and mass. The scenes become places of transition and threshold, where interior meets exterior, one space opens onto another, or a figure seems to move between one state and another. These controlled, theatrical environments exist digitally first, before being translated into painting, deliberately allowing accident and gesture to disrupt the precision of the original image. The act of painting introduces a physical and performative logic, where gesture and hesitation can overwhelm the limitations of the digital artwork. My relationship with constructed spaces comes from much earlier. I grew up in an old house in the middle of the woods in Brittany that seemed to belong to another time and, in some ways, another reality. It had an atmosphere somewhere between a house, a stage and an alternative dimension. I had the feeling of inhabiting a strange and self-contained universe. I think that sensation of an enclosed space with its own atmosphere and logic has stayed with me.
Today, I recreate that sense of constructed worlds by collecting various fragments from video games, cinema, my walks in the city and everyday spaces, rebuilding them into new scenes. This process of taking things apart and putting them back together connects to Cubism, which opened up the possibility of deconstruction and reconstruction as a process, while Minimalism made me attentive to structure, reduction, repetition and the physical presence of
simple forms. The looseness of painting on unmounted canvas is another way of resisting fixed structures, is a form of liberation. The canvas can remain a fragment, a piece of a world, an object among other objects in the physical space.
In essence, the paintings are small worlds that I hold in a state of suspension: constructed enough to feel real, but open enough to continue growing, like a germ or a crystal, generating possibilities beyond their own boundaries.
Sarah Gilbert (b. in Le Mans, France) lives and works in London.
She holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London (2010), and a DNSEP from the École des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, France (2004). In 2018, she was a resident at the Azimvt Ashram in Haridwar, India and was nominated for Mishcon de Reya and Cassart art prize (2010).
Recent exhibitions include Persona at Crypt Gallery, London (2026); Lines of Flight at Bleur Gallery, London (2026); the Annual Open at Southwark Park Galleries, London (2025); and Worlds and Scenes at Rabbet Gallery, London (2025). Previous exhibitions and collaborations include participation in the Galeristes art fair, Le Carreau du Temple, Paris (2019), represented by Gallery A1043; Tangent at Stone Space, London (2019); Cell Block in Hackney Wick, London (2019); Foolish Fire at Islington Arts Factory, London (2019); Slightly Seared on the Reality Grill at Unit 5 Gallery, London (2018); and DGTL Ldn at Unit 5 Gallery, London (2017).