Sarah Ball (British, b.1965)

Sarah Ball (British, b.1965)
Unknown
oil on panel
18 x 13 cm. (7 x 5 1/8 in.)

Provenance
With Anima Mundi, St Ives, where purchased by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
St Ives, Anima Mundi, Sarah Ball: Accused Part II, 2013

ARR

“My work is that of the gatherer; a curator of objects and ideas. My paintings allude to fable and allegory - sourced from museum curios, Victorian taxidermy, studio and police photography, anthologies and collections from the natural world as well as objects gathered from my immediate surroundings - the sources are re-cast, creating new characters in imagined scenarios" Sarah Ball

Sarah Ball, exemplifies the work of a British artist who plays with the real and the imagined, intimacy and distance and notions of new and timelessness. Represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, the Cornwall based artists references both Flemish portraiture and contemporary photography. In January 2022, the artist had her first exhibition with the gallery, and the was subsequently exhibited with Stephen Friedman at Frieze in New York.

The present work was acquired at Anima Mundi, where it sat alongside a much larger series of portraits taken from mugshot photographs. Unknown, was exhibited in 2013 in the second part of a two part series, ‘Accused: Part 2.’ Like much of Sarah Ball’s work, Unknown, offers a detailed account of the sitter while simultaneously offering a distance between us and the unknown figure. Whilst the sitter is anonymous, her badge – ‘694’ , an identifiable feature give us a mysterious meaning.