Sarah Dobai works across photography, film and video. Images of people predominate in her work but there is another aspect of her photography in which the subject matter shifts to unpeopled places. The three studies in this edition, collectively titled “Studio”, picture inanimate objects suggesting a metaphorical human presence.

Still-life was a departure for Sarah Dobai that began with “Study”, an image of an empty chair in her studio. The images in “Studio” are still-lives that cross the traditional boundaries of the genre with an approach that relates more to portraiture.

“Studio” reflects Dobai’s interest in the history of still-life in documentary photography, particularly in Walker Evans’ documentation of the Depression in 1930’s  America and in the work of Wols the Surrealist painter and photographer.

Sarah Dobai
Studio, 2002
A study in three parts.
Three Giclée prints on Somerset velvet watercolour paper
33 x 39 cm each
Edition: 45
Price: please inquire

Sarah Dobai’s first major solo exhibition in the UK took place in 2006 at Kettles’ Yard, Cambridge, coinciding with the end of her two-year residency at London's Delfina Studio Trust and featured photographic and film works made during that time, including a new, specially commissioned, two-screen film installation, as well as key earlier works. She recently showed ‘Studio/Location Photographs’ at Works/Projects, Bristol (May 2009.), ‘Photographs & Filmworks’, Kettle’s Yard (2009).

Her work has been widely shown both nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions at: Arnolfini, (Bristol) Cornerhouse (Manchester), Artists Space (New York), Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Bard College (New York State), Entwistle (London), Galerie Zurcher (Paris), Barbara Gross Galerie, (Munich), Gasworks (London) and Ludwig Museum, Cologne.