Sarah Martin-Nuss
Future Currents
Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York
March 21 - April 26, 2025
Future Currents, 2025
Oil and oil pastel on canvas
72 x 100 in (182.9 x 254 cm)
© Sarah Martin-Nuss / Courtesy Rachel Uffner Gallery
Rachel Uffner Gallery presents Future Currents, SARAH MARTIN-NUSSs’ second solo exhibition at the gallery. A site-specific performance featuring a vocal ensemble will be held within the exhibition on April 19.
In Future Currents Martin-Nuss explores, through her unique language of abstraction, the idea of currents in their many permutations. Her work contemplates how these dynamic flows—whether physical forces in nature, the passage of time, or the movement of ideas—connect, influence, and alter the environments they traverse. These currents can be subtle forces that pass by unnoticed, yet ever-present, or powerful energies that sweep us up or carry us away, dissolving boundaries and creating continuous exchanges between distinct forms that gradually evolve into new entities.
These explorations of energetic flows and metamorphosis materialize across Martin-Nuss' canvases. Her vibrant orchestrations of color, line, and space synthesize painting and drawing, as formal techniques fuse with gestural improvisations to create distinct visual rhythms and a vocabulary of mark-making unique to her artistic alchemy. In Patterns, Appearances, Tendencies, lush washes of oil paint serve as foundation for syncopated marks in pastel—at times drawn directly onto the canvas with Martin-Nuss' fingers and nails. Her rich palette of pale blues and lingering whites intermingling with flashes of ultramarine, delicate pinks, and warming ochres evokes liminal, transient moments in nature, suggesting the seasonal threshold between winter's retreat and spring's emergence.
Though evocative of waterscapes or landscapes, the paintings avoid definitive boundaries or horizon lines—a visual embodiment of Martin-Nuss' interest in ecological entanglement. In Sensation of Holding, her gestural marks bend and undulate, mimicking the nonlinear paths of water currents shaped by natural phenomena such as the Coriolis effect, temperature and salinity variations, and gravitational forces. This reflection of natural systems extends beyond water alone; similar to atmospheric currents, many of her compositions encompass pockets of serene stillness amongst moments of frenetic turbulence.
This sense of continuous movement manifests not only within individual canvases but flows between them. This is particularly evident in the diptych The Closer We Come Together, where the two panels merge perceptually into a single harmonious whole. Their visual elements seem to reconstitute into new entities through processes of continuous exchange and mutual becoming. The fluid relationship between these elements creates a subtly immersive experience, requiring viewers to engage physically with the work—stepping forward and backward, moving side to side—to fully comprehend the complexity of her churning compositions. The paintings demand a bodily response that echoes the very currents they depict.
Throughout Future Currents, a phenomenological dimension also emerges through Martin-Nuss' application of paint in multiple layers, which creates varied textures that respond dramatically to shifting light as viewers move around the canvases. As one navigates the exhibition space, certain elements of the paintings seem to rise to the surface only to fade away again, creating a sense of perpetual flux.
This interplay between surface, movement, and illumination doesn't merely create visual interest—it encapsulates time itself, with each layer suggesting overlapping temporalities. Here, Martin-Nuss reveals her fascination with time's simultaneity and how entities exist across multiple timescales. Like the strata of paint on her canvases, these temporal layers interact in complex ways—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in opposition—generating a rich, polyphonic whole that continues to evolve before the viewer's eyes, never allowing a single, fixed perspective to dominate.
Martin-Nuss’ works on paper represent a more focused microcosm of her broader explorations, revealing the constant negotiation between competing forces: growth and decay, harmony and disruption. In these intimate compositions, she blurs the boundaries between opposing forces, making it deliberately difficult to distinguish what is generative and what is destructive. These smaller-scale pieces invite closer inspection, drawing viewers into intricate worlds where creation and dissolution become inseparable aspects of the same continuous process—mirroring natural systems where breakdown often enables renewal, and apparent chaos contains its own internal logic.
In Future Currents, Martin-Nuss invites us to reconsider our relationship with time and change. Her compositions suggest that the future isn't a distant horizon but a force already flowing through our present moment. Her work encourages a recognition that all beings exist perpetually on the verge of transformation, our realities shaped by vast, interconnected systems that both influence and transcend our individual experience.
— Allison Underwood
SARAH MARTIN-NUSS (b. 1992, Corpus Christi, Texas) received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2024 and her BA in Fine Art and English Literature from Austin College in 2014. Martin-Nuss also studied visual arts at College International De Cannes, and performance, sound and video art at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is a producer, songwriter and vocalist for the avant-pop duo Dancing In Tongues. Her recent solo exhibitions include Future Currents, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, New York (2025); Pouring Water into Water, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, New York (2024); and Open Systems, Prince & Wooster, New York, New York (2023). Her recent group exhibitions include The Figure Abstracted, Prince & Wooster, New York, New York (2024); The Blue Hour, PhillipsX, New York, New York (2024); Unfixed Ecosystems: Obsidian/Yarrow, Pfizer Factory, Brooklyn, New York (2024); What in the World, at The Steuben Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2023); and Creative Distancing, at Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas (2020). Her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, Cultbytes, and New American Paintings and is included in the JPMorganChase Art Collection. Martin-Nuss lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY
170 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002
