About The Work
Hagar Sand’s paintings transform embodied experience through a fusion of psychic cartography, emotional topography, and myth-making. She embraces both visual systems and improvisation as essential to form, allowing her symbols to emerge from structure with fluidity and luminosity. This reflects the architecture of her inner consciousness, where vulnerability, desire, and mythic imagination converge. Thresholds, surfaces, and archetypal symbols become portals into the psyche. Negative space, liminality, and the body itself serve as vessels for longing, transformation, and delicate landscapes of feeling. ​
Her own experience of existing in a body serves as a reference point for this exploration and is a continuous thread running through her practice. In her most recent body of work, her process begins by making flat, spray-painted stencils of her body, which draw attention to the surface of the painting. She then applies thin layers of acrylic paint that absorb into the gaps between the sprayed areas and, finally, creates imagined landscapes in these negative spaces using oil paint. The landscapes are points of departure for imagination, teeming with details and flirting with historic painterly styles. This work reflects her own experience, probing a subtle but profound shift in the function of the female body, as she negotiates what value a body has other than as an object of desire and fertility. In her work, bodily forms are transformed—transcending geographic and symbolic boundaries—to become landscapes, oceanscapes, and metaphors for escape, freedom, and possibility.
BIO
Hagar Sand studied visual art at Rutgers University and art education at Teachers College. She has shown her work in galleries across the United States, including Anthony Philip Fine Art (Brooklyn, NY), and Blue Door Art Center (Yonkers, NY). In August 2025 she participated in an exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Greenville, South Carolina. She has taken part in residencies at Yaddo and the School of Visual Arts. Recently, she continued her education through NYC Crit Club’s The Canopy Program with mentors Catherine Haggarty and Yevgeniya Baras.
