
Sarah Schlesinger
Garden , 2025
Oil on canvas over panel
16 x 32 ins
40.6 x 81.3 cm
40.6 x 81.3 cm
Copyright The Artist
Sarah Schlesinger describes her landscapes as “views implied, but blocked”—paintings that withhold as much as they reveal. Early in her practice she painted sunlit panoramas from above, but over time...
Sarah Schlesinger describes her landscapes as “views implied, but blocked”—paintings that withhold as much as they reveal. Early in her practice she painted sunlit panoramas from above, but over time her vantage point lowered and the sun began to set. In Two Trees, this shift is palpable: in one canvas the rounded forms of the trees are only legible as a shadow pressed against a hedge, while in the next they come into focus, though still held by dusk and enclosure. In Garden, the hedge itself becomes the central subject, a wall-like expanse where the sun sits at the horizon and light barely grazes its surface. Across these works, Schlesinger undermines the traditional structure of foreground, middleground, and distance, turning the landscape into a metaphor for perception itself: the tension between clarity and obscurity, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.