Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present 'Creative Non-Fiction’, a solo show by Philadelphia based artist Sarah McEneaney, opening at Taymour Grahne Projects in Dubai on January 17, from 6 to 8 pm.

Sarah McEneaney: A Life Painted in Real Time

For nearly five decades, Sarah McEneaney has devoted her practice to a singular theme, the meticulous chronicling of her own life. In a new exhibition on view at Taymour Grahne Projects, the artist presents a series of paintings that chart the latest moments and milestones in a life.

Sarah McEneaney’s autobiographical paintings feature domestic interiors, intimate self-portraits, her studios, her animals, her neighbourhoods, travels, and community spaces. It’s the totality of a life, rendered in an engaging and evolving visual diary, sublimating the deeply personal into the universal.

But Sarah doesn’t do this via transforming herself into clichéd art-historical archetype or self-mythologising protagonist. This is the real life she lives. ‘I like to think that I'm describing a life that other people can enter into, with their own stories,’ she says. Her canvases invite that entry: they are moments of solitude and routine, suffused with quietness, grounded in the everyday. In Sarah’s works, we can all join her, we can all relate and share the tranquillity and completeness of life.

McEneaney’s instinct for autobiographical narratives emerged at an early stage in her career. In art school, when classmates were asked to paint a life model, Sarah took her perspective from the corner of the ceiling and painted the entire room – her fellow students, the life model, the paints and easels, herself. The impulse was less an artistic strategy than an intuitive orientating, a wide-angle view of her own position in the world.

Post-graduation, the studio itself became a recurring stage for her paintings. Sarah’s early studio scenes became the foundation of a lifelong project of self-observation, expanding and shifting as her life and circumstances evolved. As she moved through different residences, daily routines, and emotional experiences, her work absorbed and refracted it all. The studio progressed from being a passive workspace into a psychological environment, a canvas itself, for self-reflection. Even now, at the age of 70, Sarah speaks of her practice not as a conceptual framework but as a sustained act of documentation.

‘I look at all the work I've made, and I see this whole history, this whole trajectory of this life I've been living.’

Place plays a defining role in that trajectory. McEneaney has lived and worked in the same Philadelphia building for 46 years. It was a dilapidated structure in a rundown neighbourhood when she bought it, but now inevitably, has been transformed by decades of development. Her paintings track that shift, charting the gradual gentrification, the increasingly salubrious fabric of facilities and consequently, the changing local population and architecture.

What makes this a crucial element of McEneaney’s practice is how she has woven this intimate urban history within her personal one. Her years of personal involvement in transforming a nearby elevated rail line into a public park deepened this connection. As a founding member of her neighbourhood association, McEneaney merges artistic and social documentation.

This dual belonging, to solitude and to community, is central to her worldview. She describes the studio as a solitary arena, one she loves but could not inhabit exclusively without ‘going a little crazy.’ Community work provides a counterbalance: engagement with people, place, and civic life. In her paintings, a dynamic tension emerges from her balancing contemplative self-portraits and broader scenes of neighbourhood transformation.

The works in the exhibition at Taymour Grahne Projects reflect another evolution in Sarah’s life: the recent purchase of a small country house in southern New Jersey, a new sanctuary that has opened up a new setting for her paintings.

The interior scenes from this home - calm, light-filled rooms with animals, books, and open windows onto trees - extends her spectrum of domestic serenity. These paintings feel softer, quieter. The same cats, dogs, and familiar objects reappear, transported from Philadelphia to this new landscape. And you can almost sense the gentle exhalation of calm, as McEneaney immerses herself into a slower, greener rhythm of life.

One of the most intriguing aspects of McEneaney’s practice is her use of collage. In several works, she blends cut-up elements that are almost invisible on initial viewing, repaying closer scrutiny, complicating the apparent directness of her work. What appears to be uniformly painted reveals itself as a composite: fragments of older works printed onto rice paper, resized, and collaged into new compositions, then retouched with paint.

Sarah began using this technique in 2016, during the US presidential campaign and continued it through the first tRump (sic) administration. She began isolating and amending newspaper photographs of that ubiquitous face. Later objects such as sewing machines, books, or bumper-sticker-covered cars were painted at a larger scale, photographed, digitally resized, and collaged into the final piece. The epiphany – blowing up printouts and working them up into textured visual elements - was liberating. It allowed Sarah to enter a new dimension in her work, further exploring the layers of past and present, memory and immediacy, in a single surface. Micro-stories, now embedded and enriching the larger narrative of Sarah’s life.

This collage process also enabled McEneaney to weave political commentary into her paintings. Politics, for her, is not an abstract theme but part of her lived experience manifest in her neighbourhood advocacy, community organising and demonstrations across years of national turmoil. Her series of altered newspaper photos during the tRump (sic) years - especially her portraits made during the January 6th hearings - underscore how her work, though grounded in the domestic, remains responsive to the world around her.

Taken together, McEneaney’s paintings constitute a rare kind of autobiography, revealing the significance of ordinary life, rendered with thoughtfulness, clarity, and quiet humour. Her paintings stand as an ongoing testament to endurance, presence, and the beauty of the everyday. They remind us that a life – all our lives - contains multitudes worth recording: the familiar rituals, the shifting rooms, the evolving neighbourhoods, the animals underfoot, the moments of peace, and the moments of pain. In McEneaney’s hands, nothing is too small to matter.

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Sarah McEneaney was born in Munich, Germany in 1955. She graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1979 and to this day lives, paints and commits herself to the community of Philadelphia.

McEneaney has had solo museum shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Mills College Art Museum, CA; and the List Gallery, Swarthmore College, PA. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Here and There at the Royal Hibernian Academy of the Arts, Dublin and Creative Non-Fiction at Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai. McEneaney has been in over one hundred group shows throughout the USA and had consistent solo exhibitions in New York and Philadelphia over the last forty years.

McEneaney’s work is in the collections of Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. McEneaney has had artist residencies at Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans, the Chinati Foundation, Marfa TX, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY and the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Sarah McEneaney is represented by Locks Gallery, Philadelphia and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and collaborates closely with Taymour Grahne Projects.

Photo credit: John Carlano