Sara Genn is a Canadian-born visual artist who specializes in color field painting and installation. Based in New York City since 2003, Genn established a studio in Palm Springs, California in 2018. Mentored by her father, a Canadian landscape painter, Genn visited the wilds of British Columbia to practice plein-air painting techniques; studying moving light, eye control and designing in nature. She holds a BFA in painting from Queen’s University, and has been painting and exhibiting without interruption since 1991.

Sara Genn’s work focuses on the technical, material and aesthetic nuances of how color is perceived, preferred and organized. She does this while referencing the principles of her Japanese maternal heritage and its aesthetic of wabi-sabi: asymmetry, asperity (the roughness or irregularity of things,) simplicity, austerity and intimacy -- all of which strive for sensations of balance, rhythm, counterpoint and a defiant softness. This aesthetic philosophy acknowledges that objects and experiences are most beautiful when they evoke a feeling of spiritual longing. It strives to offer simultaneously, a place of visual shelter and excitement; and to occupy space with objects that blur the signifiers of gender, craft and monuments. As much as these works seek to embody color field foundations and to straddle sensations of weightiness and weightlessness, they’re also concerned with tactile materiality, light and shadow casting, and surface illusions. The supersoft-flatness of poured and saturated, light-bouncing spaces and their edges are meticulously created freehand; no tape is used.

Sara Genn’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Architectural Digest, NYLON Japan, American Art Collector and New York Magazine as well as in the Rizzoli publication New York Parties; Private Views. Her work resides in both private and public collections including New York Presbyterian Hospital, Palm Springs Art Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.