Overview
British artist Sarah Ball (b. 1965) will present her first institutional solo exhibition Oh! You Pretty Things at Longlati on 20 August 2025.
How is identity created, expressed, and rendered visible? In Ball’s poised and restrained portraits—infused with the aesthetic codes of fashion—identity is not portrayed as a stable condition, but as a fluid visual experiment. Through eight works, Ball weaves together an embodied inquiry that resonates beyond formal language, encompassing the nuanced expression of individuality, the performativity of identity, and offers a reflective gaze toward the cultural psyche of our time. “I’m lucky to have had David Bowie songs as a soundtrack to my life.” —Sarah Ball Oh! You Pretty Things borrows its title from British rock icon David Bowie’s 1971 song of the same name. As early as the 1970s, Bowie had already begun constructing performative personas—most notably ‘The Thin White Duke’—that predated Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Bowie’s self-mythologizing continually redefined the expressive vocabulary of popular culture.[1] The spirit of Bowie’s work is echoed in Ball’s artistic practice. For both Bowie and Ball, identity is not a static attribute...
How is identity created, expressed, and rendered visible? In Ball’s poised and restrained portraits—infused with the aesthetic codes of fashion—identity is not portrayed as a stable condition, but as a fluid visual experiment. Through eight works, Ball weaves together an embodied inquiry that resonates beyond formal language, encompassing the nuanced expression of individuality, the performativity of identity, and offers a reflective gaze toward the cultural psyche of our time.
“I’m lucky to have had David Bowie songs as a soundtrack to my life.” —Sarah Ball
Oh! You Pretty Things borrows its title from British rock icon David Bowie’s 1971 song of the same name. As early as the 1970s, Bowie had already begun constructing performative personas—most notably ‘The Thin White Duke’—that predated Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Bowie’s self-mythologizing continually redefined the expressive vocabulary of popular culture.[1] The spirit of Bowie’s work is echoed in Ball’s artistic practice. For both Bowie and Ball, identity is not a static attribute but a dynamic choreography between self-presentation and social reception, identity and performance—a visual action that is continually constructed and dismantled.
In her 2024 solo exhibition Tilted at Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, Ball examined the aesthetics of 21st-century dandyism. Her latest work continues this trajectory, advancing her visual exploration into the so-called ‘Dandy’, manifested by Bowie’s own ‘Thin White Duke’. Many of the figures in Ball’s portraits appear with meticulously applied makeup, their features imbued with a porcelain-like detachment. The artist’s affinity for the sartorial aesthetics of 1930s cinema manifests in their garments, blending romantic opulence with meticulous realism. Suits, furs, sweaters, and workwear bear subtle imprints of social conventions and classic codes. Through posture, silence, and gaze, they reveal a cultivated awareness of self-image. Their expressions do not solicit the viewer’s engagement. Instead, they seem suspended in a liminal threshold—visible, while resisting definition.
The energies of Bowie, Punk, and the New Romantics are transmuted in Ball’s work into a latent rhythm of resistance: one that concerns the creation, struggle, and assertion of individual subjectivity. It reverberates subtly yet insistently through the composed and contemplative visages she portrays. This sense of resistance also manifests in Ball’s painterly language. She consistently employs negative space—the deliberate voids surrounding the subject’s form. These unarticulated and often unpainted areas offer not just visual breath but an intentional rhythm of absence, drawing attention to what is withheld as much as what is revealed. The strategy recalls the compositional logic of 17th-century Dutch painting, in which contrasts between object and emptiness create quietude and intensity. In Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1965), Johannes Vermeer utilizes diffused light, shadows, and carefully managed voids to amplify the stillness of presence.
In Henry with Iris (2025), this becomes especially pronounced. While the subject’s face remains clearly rendered, the hands are abstracted into formless gestures, subtly displacing the visual emphasis of the composition. For Ball, painting is not a tool for mimetic representation, but rather a site of affective projection and identity analysis. These “unfinished” hands seem to embody the spirit of Bowie’s era—a period marked by fluid identities and ineffable emotions—gaining new resonance precisely through their absence.
[1] Butler’s theoretical framework, grounded in language and culture, reconceptualized “performativity” as a discursive practice rooted in gender and the body.
British artist Sarah Ball (b. 1965) will present her first institutional solo exhibition Oh! You Pretty Things at Longlati on 20 August 2025.
Installation Views
