There is an underlying beauty to nostalgia as we reflect on the people we’ve known and places we’ve been in our lives. For artist Mary Sauer it is the driving force of her paintings. It appears in the littlest, and maybe overlooked, details, such as the outfits her models wear or the room they’re standing in or the wallpaper and objects. They’re all once treasured and treasured yet again as Sauer breathes new memories and life through her compositions. This November, Sauer’s latest solo exhibition opens at Sloane Merrill Gallery in Boston, presenting a range of works she’s been creating over the past few years.Scarlett with Dishes, oil on linen, 48 x 36"Growing up in Kentucky, Sauer lived next door to her grandparents. Their homes were built by her grandfather and Sauer spent time watching her grandmother cook in a now-retro kitchen. “I see these places and I feel connected. I don’t know if it’s because of family or memories, but especially today with a lot of businesses moving online I feel like a lot of the shops and homes I depict are places I’d like to go to and physically be able to walk around,” says Sauer. “I also enjoy finding really charming, quaint bakeries and coffee shops. Places like that, where people have to go in person and visit the space.”Retro Kitchen, oil on panel, 20 x 16"Spaces are integral to Sauer’s artwork, sometimes appearing alone in works such as Yellow Kitchen and Retro Kitchen, and in others they are a smaller part of a larger narrative. However, they are where the paintings usually begin. “My husband and I bought a 100-year-old house in Utah, and we’re slowly redoing the whole thing,” says Sauer, who adds that her husband is doing most of the renovations. “My plan is to design the house so that each room can be used as a set to do photo shoots and to create paintings of figures in the home.”

She also scours real estate websites, trying to find open houses for residences that have 1950s or ’60s bathrooms and kitchens in hopes of documenting them. “I just love going and seeing the places in person and taking photos and a lot of times those become paintings,” she shares, also noting, “Where I live in Utah the real estate market is hot right now and going for crazy prices. People are taking older homes and making them look like a brand-new tract home inside and it sells for a lot more money. So these older homes, they’re disappearing and I want to find them before they’re gone.”Nancy in Green, oil on linen, 24 x 18"Often Sauer’s paintings feature her daughters, such as Scarlett with Dishes, Eventide and Girl in a White Doorway. “They’re in vintage-inspired or actual vintage outfits,” Sauer says. “It’s the kind of clothing that family members might have worn during their life. I love all historic costumes, but in my paintings I gravitate usually to the same kind of clothing that maybe my grandmother would have worn. Not clothing from a lot earlier than that, but it’s that searching for the closeness of the ones that I love who have passed away or—just like the interiors—those people who have disappeared.”Yellow Kitchen, oil on panel, 10 x 8"

Scarlett with Dishes is an award-winning painting that features her daughter Scarlett next to a child-size hutch filled with antique dishes. “This is in the bedroom that I now use for Scarlett, but it’s before we redid the room. It has 100-year-old floorboards made from Douglas fir; they’ve been painted because the finish was too old to salvage and the baseboards are probably from the 1920s in there,” Sauer explains. “The light is beautiful in that room because it’s one window that just lights the space up. The strong single directional light makes the beautiful light and shadow in there. I set her up in this vintage-style romper and slowly collected these pieces that I put together in the painting. It’s almost like I’m setting up a still life but incorporating a figure into it.” When her daughter poses, she often has her play with the props and takes photos, and then goes through them to get the right composition, light and expression.Eventide, oil on linen, 8 x 10"

Outside the subject matter, the color harmony and palette are important to Sauer’s work, and in this series of paintings a theme of greens and golds emerged unknowingly throughout. “The No. 1 thing that draws me into the painting idea would be the color palette,” the artist shares. “There were several years when I was mostly kind of interested in whites and grays, and the subtle nuances in a composition where most of the objects were within that restricted color range.Girl in a White Doorway, oil on linen, 20 x 16"

I found that when the light hit something in the color of the shadow there are so many little minute changes and chroma within a very tight range of value. I thought it was super beautiful and fascinating. A lot of the work that I’m doing for this show, I didn’t realize, but there’s a lot of green and gold within the compositions. I get fascinated with a color and then I’m interested and attracted to that palette as I’m trying to set up a painting idea.”

Nancy in Green is a prime example and depicts a friend, Nancy, who Sauer met 10 years ago while working as a studio assistant for Jeff Koons. “She worked there at the same time that I did, and she had this apartment in Brooklyn,” recalls Sauer. “[It has this] hand-stenciled wall design. It’s at least a 15-foot-long hallway that she painted and it’s absolutely gorgeous. When I was at her apartment, I was super struck with this mural that she painted, and I had to photograph her in front of it. The pattern and the color palette, it all just really came together.”The Coffee Shop, oil on panel, 12 x 12"Painting for Sauer can be almost a form of mediation, it’s something she cannot live without and is a respite among the chaos. She says, “The interiors go back to this idea of how the nostalgia makes me feel…this is how life would be if it was idealized. I feel like I do a similar thing with the paintings of children. I’m not painting them with all their Barbie dolls on the floor. I’m searching for this type of idealization that romanticizes the idea, so when I’m doing a painting, it really centers me and really brings me to this place where I can escape.” —

Mary Sauer
When: November 5-30, 2021
Where: Sloane Merrill Gallery, 75 Charles Street, Boston, MA 02114
Information: (617) 227-1775, www.sloanemerrillgallery.com

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