Sara Genn distills the act of painting to its material core, wresting boundless variation from subtle distinctions of color, shape, texture, and touch. How to Build a Sky is the first solo institutional exhibition for the New York- and Palm Springs-based artist, featuring a suite of paintings that respond to SITE’s architectural frame and a mural commissioned for the building’s courtyard.

Genn invigorates traditions of geometric abstraction with her own signature technique, mixing custom pigments and rejecting hard edges in favor of what she calls “a defiant softness.” Poured acrylic absorbs into raw canvas to achieve a velvety saturation, and serpentine motifs provide roving pathways for the eye to travel.

Her latest paintings are tiered, multi-panel constructions that urge visual ricochets between stacked canvases. Outside, the mural’s gentle gradients of blue seamlessly give way to the surrounding sky. That ethereal precision harkens back to a long line of painters, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Agnes Martin: artists who, like Genn, moved to the American West and found their work transformed by the desert light. Her crisp lines and contours appear somehow pre-ordained but are made entirely by hand – a re-centering of tactile, analog means in an increasingly mediated world.