Ceysson & Bénétière

Ceysson & Bénétière is pleased to present a solo booth of new monotype prints and a new
painting by New York based artist Sadie Laska, a series which made its debut in Laska’s large-scale
career survey exhibition in spring of 2023 at Ceysson & Bénétière Saint-Étienne.

Although not necessarily or always political, Laska’s works are highly aware of the inescapability
of our economic, ecological, and political landscape. Using the visual languages of collage,
printmaking, abstraction, and poster art, Laska leverages humor and repetition to recall the
meme-ification of current affairs.

Work on paper, particularly collage, has always played a central role in Laska’s body of work;
informing the ways in which she finds, forms, and layers imagery across her various media. In her
paintings, ad clippings from vintage women’s magazine, photos of mannequin heads, pieces of
fabric, and recognizable stars from an American flag are set between gestural layers of paint.
These cut elements bring with them not only their fraught meanings—the commodification of
women’s reproductive health, the sanctity of the flag, etc.—but also serve as visual references that
re-appear in later series.

In later flag works, Laska again explores what occurs when the image is cut, repeated, and
commodified; applying this commodification to the fraught symbolic format of the flag. From her paintings and flag works, stemmed a new series of monotypes—which Ceysson &
Bénétière will be focusing on in its NADA Miami 2023 presentation. The monotypes take many of
the same motifs from the flag works and layer them with sheer swaths of ink and dot motifs
reminiscent of the earlier paintings. Laska actually sees the monotypes as paintings of sorts, using
the same visual language of abstraction found in her gestural works on canvas. While not literally
cut and pasted, the figures that appear in the monotypes seem directly lifted from the flags and
placed into these compositions. Again we see repetition. The figure becomes like a commodity
which begins to appear again and again almost like an advertisement. Although hands, profiles,
and language still play a role, they seem increasingly abstracted and gestural. Peppered
throughout the monotypes are segments of phrases—“no utopia for you” “all American” “Hey me”
—like sound bites, they float to the surface of the noise but give no context for their meanings.

The process of dissecting, abstracting, and reassembling lends a sense of uncanniness and
disorientation reflective of the time we are collectively living. Anxiety joins forces with humor and
the repetition of motifs and images recall the meme-ification of current affairs.

Biography

Sadie Laska (b. 1974, West Virginia) is a visual artist and musician living in Queens, New York. She
received her MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2014. Laska’s work has been
shown internationally, with solo shows at Canada, New York; O" ce Baroque, Brussels; KS Art,
New York; and Ceysson & Bénétière, in Paris, Saint Etienne, France; Luxembourg and Geneva. In
2017, she was the subject of a three-person exhibition at Newport Street Gallery, London,
organized by Damien Hirst. That same year, Laska curated Animal Farm, a group exhibition at the
Brant Foundation and Study Center in Greenwich, CT. Additionally, her work has been included in
group exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, White Columns,
Marlborough Gallery, James Fuentes Gallery, all in New York; among others. Laska’s band, I.U.D.
has performed at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1 Contemporary Art
Center, The Kitchen, ISSUE Project Room, Astrup Fearnley and the Kunsthalle Zürich.