SARA BICHÃO – Gate A
We have the pleasure to exhibit Gate A by Sara Bichão.
Press Release
GATE A: THE BEGINNING IS THE END IS THE BEGINNING
The ten drawings being shown at Arte Institute’s virtual gallery – selected out of the forty-five that comprise Sara Bichão’s “Open Gates” exhibition at Rooster gallery – could provide an introductory overview of the artist’s body of work.
Formally, drawing constitutes the primary moment of “Open Gates,” a broader project Sara Bichão has been developing. Following a personal and mental ordering logic, this first moment of Sara’s creative process is titled “Gate A.” If the artist’s mind could be summarized to a circular shaped corridor with communicating rooms along its way – therefore having no end and no beginning – this would be the first gate one would have to open in order to unveil what lies beyond. These nonphysical rooms populated with concepts and memories would have exactly the same size, a clear indication that no stage would overlap or claim precedence over the other.
The drawings that inhabit “Gate A“ are not sketches or preparatory studies. By loosely drawing on single sheets of paper, without geometric restrictions or apparent guiding symmetry, where arcane symbols bearing the ancestral charge of a universal idiom live, Sara is able to distance herself from the pressures of the support material. Paper provides a pictorial space freed from compositional restraints; thus the outcome is both unconsciously intimate and purposely universal.
Paradoxically, “Gate A” is as much an introduction as it is a conclusion.
André Escarameia Calha New York, May 2012
Biography
Sara Bichão (born 1986) has been living and working in Lisbon, but recently moved to New York and is represented by Rooster Gallery, where she currently has a show titled “Open Gates.” She holds a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the School of Fine Arts of Lisbon (2011) and is doing a residence at Residency Unlimited in New York (February through June 2012). She won the BPI/FBAUL Prize 2008 for painting, was selected for Anteciparte’09 and for the Fidelidade Mundial – Young Painters Prize 2009.