Sarah Pickstone lives and works in London, creating her art from her studio at Cubitt Artists. She exhibits both in Europe and internationally, and her works are held in numerous private collections, as well as in the public collections of the Royal Academy of Arts, Société Générale (UK Collection), Saatchi Collection, The Walker Art Gallery (National Museums of Liverpool), The Mercer Art Gallery (Yorkshire Museums), and the British School at Rome.
Pickstone studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and was awarded the prestigious Rome Scholarship in Painting. During her year in Italy, she experienced a profound impact on her artistic development. She continues to research and paint in Italy, spending part of the year working in Umbria.
She won the esteemed John Moores Painting Prize in 2012 and was a runner-up in 2004.
Recent work: An Allegory of Painting was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts in London to celebrate the life of Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807).
Sarah Pickstone’s paintings explore structures—both historical and visual—process, and the architecture of color. Influenced by art history and post-feminist critique, her new work celebrates the materiality of painting, the passage of time, and the potential for new thinking and transformation.
Working in series, Pickstone's art is often inspired by literature and emerges from a sense of storytelling. Many of her works feature female protagonists—saints, literary characters, artists, and writers—as their central themes. She views her paintings as an archipelago of short chapters or stories within a broader group of works.
Portal is a series of paintings and drawings based on a motif from a Greek vase in a Berlin museum. In this series, the maenad explores the structure of the phallus—changing through it, dancing with it, and stepping through it into a new space.
For Pickstone, painting represents the human, painterly instinct that resists the mechanical and digital.
