Sarah Drinan (b. 1994, Australia) creates paintings that express a tender awareness of current discourses around the body, embracing the absurdity of living in an often destabilising and perverted world. Drinan’s fleshy compositions are informed by her background in mental health occupational therapy as well as a diverse image bank of personal snapshots, internet archives, and the vast history of figurative art. Her anonymous figures merge and detach into ambiguous scenarios, first rendered and manipulated with digital media and 3D modelling apps, before being translated into the glowing physicality of paint. Through this, she honours the complexity of the body and human experiences of vulnerability, pleasure, perversion and pain.
Drinan was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Australia’s most generous prize for artists under 40, and as a two-time finalist for the Brett Whitley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2022 and 2021. In 2022, she was awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship Residency at Shark Island Kangaroo Valley. Her work is held in private and public collections, including Artbank, Australia.