About The Work
Hagar Sand’s paintings transform embodied experience through a fusion of psychic cartography, emotional topography, and myth-making. She builds symbolic ecosystems in which bodies, landscapes, animals, and geological forms continually transform into one another. Embracing both visual systems and improvisation as essential to form, she allows her compositions to emerge both structure and fluidity.
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Her own experience of existing in a body serves as a reference point for her work, and is a continuous thread running through her practice. ​In her most recently completed series, the Fantasies series, she stenciled flat shapes of her traced body with spray-paint, creating a skeleton of a composition. She then applied thin layers of acrylic paint that absorbed into the gaps between the spray-painted areas. Finally, she developed these negative spaces with oil paint into imagined landscapes. These paintings reflect a subtle but profound shift in the function of her body, as she negotiates what value it has other than as an object of desire and fertility.
BIO
Hagar Sand studied visual art at Rutgers University and art education at Teachers College. She has shown her work in galleries and artist-run spaces, including Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville, SC), and Pelham Art Center (Pelham, NY). 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.
