SARA LANDAU BIO

b. 1974

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Born into a family that is deeply involved in the international world of fine art, Sara Landau could hardly help developing a passion for art. She chose to study her metier at Skidmore College in New York, which is well known for its particularly strong program in Fine Arts. While at Skidmore, she began to develop an effective personal style focusing on expressive figure painting, using paint quality and vibrant colour to create the mood in each painting. This looser figurative style soon evolved into a more hyper-realistic technique and Sara became devoted to painting the human face that she had previously avoided.

Always intrigued and partly obsessed with how society has created this "ideal woman's" appearance, Sara hopes to raise questions in her spectators' minds about what constitutes perfection. Possibly the imperfections inherent in the painting medium, as opposed to the precision of photography, will subtly enhance the controversy.

Sara has continued to depict beautiful women in brilliant colour, placing great emphasis on the rendering of the eyes and facial features to capture the intensity and mood of her subject. Each canvas acquires a personality as she works, thus each has a name. Carefully cropping the image to rarely show more than a part of the subject's face, she creates a certain mystery, an enigma for the viewer to contemplate.