Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to announce Fangs and Fruits, and Falling Trees, a solo exhibition of new works by Sarah Bedford. Created during her year at the Sharpe-Walentas Residency Program, this series sees Bedford merge still life and landscape traditions, drawing inspiration from necropastoral poetry where idealized natural scenes intertwine with themes of decay, transformation, and mystery. Her paintings become layered explorations of memory, ecology, and the natural world's regenerative cycles.

Bedford’s creative process begins with gouache studies on paper, which she then translates to canvas using loose acrylic washes, layered oil glazes, and oil pastel accents. With a restrained palette of jade greens, sulfur yellows, and earthy carnelian reds and browns, she choreographs plant, rock, and seed forms into twisting, rhythmic movements. Her flowers bend and droop as if alive, forming shifting, self-contained ecosystems. Like pomegranates splitting open or wasps breaking through volcanic stone, these works embody time in motion; flux, rupture, and transformation.

Working with an earthen, mineral-rich palette, Bedford depicts elements like thistles, cocoons, milkweed, and night crawlers, symbols of life unfolding beneath the surface. Her compositions evoke the unseen vitality of the underground, where roots twist with time and emotion, and where endangered or extinct species, such as the Ghost Orchid or the lost Sophora Toromiro tree, appear grafted to vines, carnivorous plants, and fallen fruit. From these juxtapositions, hallucinatory hybrids emerge. Strange, primordial forms suspended between growth and decay, earth and sky, deepening the sense of geologic time across her canvases.

In Wooly Devil, Bedford portrays a newly discovered species from Big Bend National Park, nestled within a glowing yellow cavern. These tiny, furry plants, tucked into dark crevices, hover on the threshold of life like chrysalises about to unfurl. This tension between concealment and release mirrors the emotional currents running through Bedford’s work, where the natural world serves as a site of both grounding and transcendence. Elsewhere, corkscrew Ghost Orchids transform into oversized, moth-like creatures fluttering through swampy, moss-colored fields.

Deeply connected to nature and plant life, a bond rooted in her upbringing on the wide plains of eastern Montana, Bedford’s floral paintings challenge genre conventions, offering a feminist narrative that emphasizes cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. By incorporating extinct and uncanny flora, she highlights life's fragility and evokes both remnants of a lost world and the possibilities of unknown futures.

In Fangs and Fruits, and Falling Trees, Bedford transcends a mere reflection of the natural world, instead revealing its interior life; a space where beauty and loss coexist, and where transformation is constant, quiet, and profound.

Sarah Bedford received her BFA from Cooper Union, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and recently completed the 2024-25 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Residency. The artist was included in the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th Anniversary Artists Exhibition in 2024. Bedford has been awarded the Lower East Side Printshop Fellowship, the National Academy of Design Painting Award and co-curated Flower Craft at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY, New York. Represented by Mrs. since 2020, Bedford’s most recent solo exhibition was held during the winter of 2023. Other notable solo and group shows include: Vitrine Gallery, Bermondsey Square, London, UK; Secrist Beach, Chicago, IL; Charles Moffett, Albertz Benda Gallery, Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY; and Foyer, Los Angeles, CA among others. She has been profiled in publications such as Galerie Magazine, Maake Magazine, Hyperallergic, and listed as a ‘must see’ in Artforum.  The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  This is her second solo exhibition with the gallery.

For press inquiries or more information, please contact: hello@mrsgallery.com.