Alison Saar works in a primarily figurative vein, featuring the human body, often female, in various states of emotional or physical expressiveness that can border on the surreal, as when tears weep from a person's back, or tendrils descend from a figure's feet to root into the earth. She favors elemental mediums such as wood or metal and has experimented recently with other materials including glass, which has allowed her to conduct fluids between different vessels representing body parts, opening up even more metaphorical possibilities. Saar taps the symbolic richness of found objects, reusing cast iron frying pans as ideally-sized surfaces for portraits—the pans' "seasoning" (the aromatic patina that builds up after frying stuff) becoming part of the object's story, focused around domestic labor. The spades of shovels, or the soles of shoes, become similar canvases, their intended purposes lending an immediate, if abstract, complexity of meaning.

She has had solo exhibitions at Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Brooklyn Museum, High Museum in Atlanta, OMI International Arts Center in Ghent, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Springfield Art Museum, UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, and Santa Monica Museum of Art. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The New Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Getty Center in Los Angeles, The Studio Museum in Harlem, among many other institutions. Saar has been awarded many distinguished grants, honors, and residencies including awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Courtesy of BAM