About Sarah Martin-Nuss
Sarah Martin-Nuss (b. 1992, Corpus Christi, Texas) is a multidisciplinary artist engaged in painting, drawing, performance, and sound. Martin-Nuss received her BA in Fine Art and English Literature from Austin College in 2014. Additionally, she has studied visual art at College International De Cannes, and performance, sound, and video art at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Martin-Nuss is currently an MFA candidate at Pratt Institute with a concentration in painting and drawing. Further, she is a producer, songwriter, and lead vocalist for the experimental pop duo Dancing In Tongues.

Martin-Nuss’ style is transfigurative, joining the coevolution of the body with other forms of life, the environment, and technology. She fuses gestural improvisations with formal techniques to establish unique visual rhythms and a distinct personal language of mark-making. Her work has been featured in solo and group shows in New York and Texas. She is based in Brooklyn, New York. 

Prince & Wooster is pleased to present Open Systems, Sarah Martin-Nuss’ first solo exhibition in New York. In Open Systems, Martin-Nuss dissolves the boundaries separating representation from abstraction in a new series of paintings that dematerialize the human form into abstract systems. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the body and its environment, the paintings question fundamental distinctions between internal and external, self and other.

Throughout the body of work, Martin-Nuss overlays soft washes of oil paint with hand-drawn pastel notations, inviting an exploration of the interplay between representational elements and linguistic inscriptions. This layered, tactile quality generates a sense of time. The artist’s dynamic layering illuminates, shifts, and, transformations at a multitude of temporal planes. This embodies Martin-Nuss’ fascination with the concept of simultaneity as it relates to metamorphosis, growth, and decay, suggesting that various temporal states–past, present, and future–can coexist within a single visual field.

For Martin-Nuss, this process of metamorphosis is constant and filled with possibility. In Open Systems, she imagines a more empathetic mode of coexistence and shapes a multidimensional exploration of the interconnectedness of life, energy, and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and their environment. By blurring the distinctions that separate representation from abstraction, she invites viewers to engage with these intricate concepts, challenging the conventional notion of individualized existence.