Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: sarahblaustein.com
Sarah Blaustein was born in 1982 in the East Bay, growing up near Oakland, California. She earned a BA in 2004 from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, and went on to study at the New York Studio School, the Art Students League of New York, and Syracuse University’s program in Florence, Italy. After years in New York, she returned to the Bay Area, where she now lives and works, painting out of a converted garage studio overlooking redwood trees.
Blaustein is represented by Hesse Flatow in New York, where she has held two solo exhibitions, Central Feeling (2023) and Analytic Third (2025). Her other solo shows include Recent Paintings at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco (2023), Present Tense at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José (2023), and Overture, her Los Angeles debut, at Night Gallery (2024). Her work has also appeared at art fairs including FOG Design+Art, Art Basel Miami Beach, the Dallas Art Fair, and The Armory Show.
In 2026, Blaustein was selected for a residency through the American Academy in Rome’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Program, where she will paint from February through March. She also has upcoming presentations of new work in the group exhibition Field Guide at Library Street Collective in Detroit and Blush, a group show with Night Gallery at Christie’s in San Francisco.
Blaustein makes brightly hued, gesturally abstract paintings in acrylic and ink, using water as an active working medium that she moves across the canvas with sponges, rags, and house-painting brushes rather than conventional brushwork alone. She favors fast-drying, permanent materials specifically because they add pressure and immediacy to her process, describing her studio ritual — filling and refilling a jug of water, working in the short window before it needs replenishing — as a meditative, almost performative discipline.
Her paintings pursue sensation and memory rather than representation: bands and pools of saturated color bleed and collide to register bodily and emotional states in real time. Recent bodies of work have drawn on psychoanalytic ideas of intersubjective space (Analytic Third) and musical structure (Overture), reflecting a recurring interest in painting as a live exchange between artist, canvas, and viewer.
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