Sarah Slappey

Sarah Slappey was born in 1984 in Columbia, South Carolina. She earned a BA in Studio Art from Wake Forest University in 2006, then spent nearly a decade developing her practice before returning to graduate study, earning an MFA in Painting from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 2016. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Slappey paints in oil, building tightly composed canvases of body parts, hands, limbs, pearls, and jewelry that are stretched, coiled, and compressed into forms that sit between tenderness and violence. The work has been read as an exploration of femininity, adornment, and vulnerability, using an intimate, almost decorative visual language to hold uncomfortable content. She has held solo exhibitions with Sargent's Daughters in New York, including Power Play (2020) and Self Care (2021), and with Bernheim Gallery (formerly Galerie Maria Bernheim) in Zurich and London, including Tenderizer (2020), Sacrifices (2022), and Bloodline (2024). Earlier solo shows include Night Feeding at Crush Curatorial (2019) and Soft, Pink, and Warm at Deanna Evans Projects (2019).

Slappey's paintings have drawn coverage from major art and culture outlets, including Artforum, The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Artsy, and Flash Art, generally framing her work around the collision of hyperfeminine surface and bodily distress: pearls, polished nails, and soft flesh rendered with a jeweler's precision, then twisted into forms that suggest strain or harm. No exact, attributable critical quotation could be confirmed in the available research for this profile, so none is reproduced here. The consistent thread across coverage is that her technical control, built on close, almost photographic rendering, is what makes the discomfort in the imagery land.

Slappey's auction market is young and thin. Her current publicly documented auction high is Black Pearls II, which sold for HK$1,008,000 (about USD 129,600) at a Phillips Hong Kong 20th Century and Contemporary Art sale in late 2022. She had made her auction debut a few months earlier, on March 9, 2022, at Phillips' New Now sale in New York, where Yellow Touch (2018) sold for USD 100,800 against a high estimate of USD 12,000, roughly nine times the estimate. Her work also appeared in a Sotheby's Contemporary Day Auction in October 2022, though a confirmed price for that lot was not available in the sources reviewed for this profile. With only a handful of public sales on record, her auction history should be read as an early signal rather than an established price curve.

Slappey's market is still in its early stages. She has a small number of clearly documented auction results, the highest to date from a Phillips Hong Kong sale in late 2022, and collectors should treat any broader claim about pricing trends with caution given how few public sales exist. There is no catalogue raisonne, which is typical for an artist this early in her career, and works are best authenticated through her representing galleries, Sargent's Daughters and Bernheim Gallery. Her growing presence in institutional collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and the Albertina, is a more reliable signal of critical standing than the auction record alone.