SARAH LANDAU-MINTZ
Sarah Landau-Mintz was born in Paris where she now lives and works. While
working as a lawyer in the early eighties, she started to study drawing, painting
and sculpture. She studied several disciplines, including engraving and lithography,
under the direction of established artists teaching notably in the Modern Art
Museum of Paris, in the Roederer Academy, in Tuscany (Italy), and completed
her studies in Aesthetics and Art History at the Institute for Superior Studies
in Paris.
Using delicate line work through numerous drawings with pen, ink, watercolor
and oil, her first works convey the fragility of childhood. She drew her inspiration
from her imaginary memories as a child of the generation who survived the holocaust.
This series contains works in pencil, pastels and oil. Gradually beginning to
feel the need to leave the emotional territory which dominated her work, she
started to concentrate on a more intellectual approach to the constant problems
in painting: composition, color, values. As seen on the series
of still life done in pastel works beginning in 1988, this studio work “contains
the importance of an approach, which, although somehow very cerebral, nevertheless
borders upon a very sensitive vision of the constant principles of painting,
meaning a skill technique of using color without losing feelings of tension”
(D.Romero Professor of Aesthetics and Art History).
In 1990-91 she took on the study of nature “sur le motif” with a series of landscapes, mostly done in pastel.
The years 1992-93 marked her first steps towards abstraction: Variations
on the Curve (see Nocturne, pastel on paper) , a series of oil
paintings, pastels and collages of larger format, is a reflection upon the emotive
value of line and shape, and the temperature of color. Searching for all the
possibilities to experiment with volume and space, she was drawn quite naturally
to sculpture. Beginning from an early leaning towards more
traditional shapes, she developed a series of nudes in clay, which led her later
on to a choice of new materials (iron, brass, steel).
In a paradoxical and complementary vision, she abandoned mass and volume in
order to stress the tensions and lines in space (see Butterflies in Search of
Springtime). Working on the sensitivity of matter, she continues to explore
the flexibility of metal and questions the emotions contained in the shape itself,
eliciting a deeply personal introspective response from the subject.
E X H I B I T I O N S
• Several group exhibitions and Salons, such as Realités
Nouvelles and Contemporaines in the Grand
Palais in Paris in 1992 - 1995.
• Several individual exhibitions of drawings, paintings and sculptures,
mainly in Paris (City Hall) and Art Galleries.
• Special guest of the Air and Space Museum in an exhibit about “Art,
air and space” in Oct.99 -June 2000
• In private collections in France, Israel and United States.