Sarah McRae Morton | The Wandering Fireside

This December, we are excited to welcome Sarah McRae Morton back to Foster/White. In her newest body of work, McRae Morton pairs the domesticity of the hearth with the feral volatility of a wildfire. Referencing A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's posthumously published memoir of his time as a young writer in Paris, The Wandering Fireside denotes a place not only of cooking, but of storytelling. And it is storytelling that lies at the heart of McRae Morton's painting practice.

Known for her exquisite brushwork and incomparable ability to render movement on a still canvas, McRae Morton continues to expand on her skill by taking brilliant risks with works like Buffalo Jump after Guernica by Pablo Picasso, in which abstracted animals from the American West swirl in a fury of erasure and emergence. Grounding the show are four beasts, each symbolizing a source of sustenance for the body and spirit: a Yellowstone bison, a Pennsylvania dairy cow, and two bulls - one described by Hemingway and the other by Picasso. In The Wandering Fireside, as in so much of McRae Morton's work, the tame and the wild come together in brilliant, fractured narratives that push beyond the veil of reality and give voice to the myths that shape us.

Sarah McRae Morton grew up in rural Lancaster County Pennsylvania, where she still keeps a hayloft studio above the horse stalls in her family’s barn. Sarah attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received a travel fellowship to study chemical composition of paintings in Rome, and studied with Odd Nerdrum in Norway. Sarah is a recipient of a Matisse Foundation fellowship for her work on the local history of West Virginia. Her work has been exhibited widely across the US and in Europe. She currently lives and paints in Cologne, Germany.