Sara Dare

Sara Dare is a British painter based in Worthing, UK. Working across canvas and paper, her abstract practice uses colour, shape and material to evoke feelings of familiarity, curiosity and unease. Forms emerge intuitively and through encounters with everyday visual language – from toys and road signs to the geometries of post-war abstraction – balancing humour, tension and bodily suggestion. Her recent series, Hystera, takes the chevron paintings of Kenneth Noland as a starting point, reclaiming the ‘V’ from the male-dominated history of abstract painting. The form becomes bodily: an opening, threshold and recurring motif through which Dare explores womanhood, sexuality, absence and transformation.

The title derives from the Greek word for uterus and connects to her experience of hysterectomy and the language surrounding the altered female body. Material and process heighten the sensory experience of the work. Where earlier paintings embraced gloss, fluidity and drips, recent works use diluted paint stained directly into raw canvas. Colour becomes embedded within the object itself, combining fluidity with control and leaving little room for correction. Dare studied Fine Art Painting at the University of Brighton and later undertook the Turps Education Correspondence Course. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.