Artist Statement

Sarah von Sydow’s paintings grow from elemental forms—raindrops, blossoms, vessels—that function as ideograms. Working through grisaille, glazing, and stencil techniques adapted from theorem painting and fraktur, she treats surface as a cosmological field: motifs fold history, material, and perception into atmospheres that are at once botanical and celestial. Drawing on Goethe’s morphologies and Henry Corbin’s imaginal, her work stages a porous ontology where immanence and the imaginal interpenetrate. Rather than illustrate an argument, her paintings generate thought through process: the painting itself is the thinking. In oil’s slow density she finds the time and thickness required for images that insist on presence and speculative reach.