Sarah Butsavage is an American-born painter living and working in Toulouse, France. Born outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2012.

After graduating, while working with acrylic and oil pastels in her Brooklyn studio, Sarah began employing blocks of color as grounds for drawing. It was here that an organic pull between drawing and painting began to converge on canvas. Her work, then and now, is rooted in an ongoing exploration of the fundamental questions of what it is “to be.” Her paintings emerge in response to questions such as: What is it to be a woman? What is it to inhabit the ambiguity of life? And, most recently, through her Monuments series: What does it mean to acknowledge our impermanence?

She says, “I enjoy trying to re-create the feeling of ‘the dizziness of freedom’ (Kierkegaard). It’s a strange state that we live in as both mind and body, subject and object, tiny dot in the universe and the main character of our own lives. We’re stuck in a flowing river of time, bound to a body that wilts and weathers. I’m attempting to illustrate that kaleidoscopic feeling of existence.”