COOPER COLE is pleased to present a new suite of images by Sara Cwynar as part of Art Basel OVR:2020

Sara Cwynar is a video artist and photographer whose work involves a constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, layering diverse imagery with reference to history, theory, and mediated life. Her photographs often take the form of sculptural constructions that are photographed, printed, tiled and re-photographed as new images. She strives to situate an individual approach within the shared visual codes of popular culture.

For Art Basel OVR:2020 Cwynar will present a grid of new photographs. These images reflect on the volume of media through which we gather information, specifically in the time of a pandemic, and the increasing difficulty in defining a self or a position against all this.

In these works, Cwynar works to replicate the new common mediated space through which we interface with the world. The works include images of politicians, social media platforms, art historical paintings, celebrity before and after images, idealized ‘healthy’ bodies, self-portraits, natural and digital depictions of nature, and more. In combining these references together, Cwynar questions what it means to be a subject in relation to the current overwhelming media landscape, where it is it increasingly difficult to grasp what is true or real.

Sara Cwynar(b. 1985, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is interested in the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Her conceptual photographs and films involve constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, layering diverse imagery with references to art theory. The works intricately recall advertisements, retail catalogues, and old art history textbooks. Her visual assemblages meditate on how vernacular images shape collective world views, and how those ideals can change through time and contextual manipulation.

Cwynar was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award and the 2020 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She earned her Bachelor of Design from York University in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. She has exhibited at international museums including the Museum of Modern Art (2019); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2019); Milwaukee Art Museum (2019); Oakville Galleries (2018); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018); Museum für Moderne Kunst (2017); the Fondazione Prada (2016); and MoMA PS1 (2015), and international galleries including The Approach, London (2020); Foxy Production, New York (2017); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2016); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2015), M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); and Fluxia Gallery, Milan (2014). In 2014, Cwynar was awarded the Printed Matter Emerging Artists Publication Series and published her first monograph, entitled Kitsch Encyclopedia, with Blonde Art Books. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums including the Guggenheim Museum (New York), SFMoMA (San Francisco), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Cwynar currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA.