Tower: Sarah Gamble

Marcia Wood Gallery is delighted to introduce the Philadelphia-based artist, Sarah Gamble, with her first exhibition in Atlanta. This will be the first exhibition held at the Castleberry Hill location since January 2016 and there are multiple events planned to celebrate the artist and the Castleberry Hill gallery. 

Sarah Gamble’s mixed-media, energetic, mysterious and humorous works aggregate to suggest a parallel alternate mystical world. An early fascination with making the invisible visible, Gamble combined fantastic abstraction in traditional landscapes in an exploration of psychic and natural phenomena. Striving to contextualize a curiosity with possibilities of afterlife, lingering ideas and impressions and the meanings we place on things provides Gamble with the path on her journey of understanding the ultimate existential question of existence. She uses imagery such as Cochina dolls, nighttime skies, her passed Grandmother, eyes, the Tower of Babel, and as coined by Stephanie Young in Beautiful Decay “portraits of alien weirdos” to investigate and make sense out the world we inhabit. The title of this exhibition, “Tower” is represented by a work on paper that is an interpretation, in dots, of Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel”. Gamble speaks of her sense that making art work is a life long adventure of attempts at expression and interpretation that endlessly shift, tantalizingly close at hand but always just out of reach. Gamble’s expressionistic style, the ease with which she works the paint, and her willingness to experiment with media, foster the creation of un-knowable spaces and otherworldly moods. 

Gamble received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and a BFA from the Corcoran Gallery College of Art and Design, Washington, DC. In 2009 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and completed a year-long residency at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, New Mexico, 2014. She has exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions since 2003. She is represented in Philadelphia by Fleisher Ollman Gallery and shows at Edward Thorp Gallery in New York City.