Sarah Martin-Nuss and the Art of Cleaving

'Break, break, break / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!' So goes Alfred, Lord Tennyson's elegy ('Break, Break, Break', 1835) for his beloved friend, Arthur Hallam, the rhythm of repeated rupture animating the poem. Sarah Martin-Nuss's composition When Waters Break, 2026 – and the other paintings included in Alchemies – similarly invoke a break or caesura. But rather than marking the time of death and the rituals of mourning, her painting actualises the rupture when life itself is brought forth. In her own poem recited as part of an earlier exhibition, Martin-Nuss asked, referring to the break that marks transformation from one state to the next, 'When does something become?' 

Sarah Martin-Nuss, When Waters Break, 2026

In Martin-Nuss's paintings, moments of stillness, breaks from ineluctable motion, emerge in the form of widening apertures that offer the eye some respite. In these spaces, the waters part, and we find ourselves in one of J.M.W. Turner's scenes; tumultuous masses of abstracted human forms give way to passages of light leading into the sea and into the picture plane itself. Such occasions in Martin-Nuss's canvases show action that has lulled but remains both immanent and imminent. Often centrally located, these openings do not mark narrative ends but rather the proverbial eyes of the storm, characterised by liquid depths whose potency belies their calm appearance.

Rupture in Martin-Nuss's work is wholly dependent on its opposite: merger. Walt Whitman rhetorically asked, 'Who need be afraid of the merge?' (Leaves of Grass, 1855). This is an art that defies any such fear and embraces merging as a central condition of art-making and of the human experience more generally. Influenced by German biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, the artist shows in her work the potency of his claim, 'Artworks never try to demonstrate content in purely objective terms, but always allow for an experience of at least partial entanglement' (Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics of the Anthropocene, 2019).

'Entanglement' is a term by which to understand both the central questions animating Martin-Nuss's work as well as her formal methods. What kind of entanglement is less extricable, more complete, if only for a stretch of time, than that between mother and child? Theological significance notwithstanding, what lies at the heart of Renaissance and Baroque renderings of the Virgin and Jesus is a fundamental appreciation for the way that mother and child are indivisible. While comparing Martin-Nuss's abstractions to religious paintings of over five hundred years ago could seem a stretch, one might nonetheless discover philosophical continuities that exist beyond dogma or representational practice. The corpus of work included in this exhibition was created in the months immediately following the birth of the artist's son; one could perhaps think of the baby and the work as co-conceived. Of course, any mother/artist will tell you a painting or poem or line of music is not a baby, and a baby is not an art object or book. But both are marked by a moment of becoming – when cells divide, when parts gain function, when the canvas is more covered than blank, when marks become meaning.

Martin-Nuss's preoccupation with merging is clear not only on the level of philosophical content but also painterly practice. Her deployment of wet-on-wet painting – a technique shared by some of her influences, most notably Turner and Joan Mitchell – embraces, even celebrates the joining. It espouses a fearless refusal of separateness, at the risk of rendering form formless and yet masterfully maintaining a kind of boundedness. She is also an avowed finger painter; the body of the artist drawn into intimate relation with the art, as though their physical forms were contiguous.

In her poem drawn from her 2025 exhibition Future Currents, Martin-Nuss beckons, 'Come closer'. Proximity and distance, push and pull are simultaneously demanded by her canvases. The artist draws close to paint and steps back to look; the viewer chooses how close to come to the painting, selecting what to focus on, what to see. We are ensconced in a gentle dance, one step forward, another step back, trying to match our rhythm to the undulating gestures on the canvas. Weber speaks of 'tenderness toward what is really there' (Enlivenment, 2019); this tender relation is what these canvases demand of us as viewers. I invoke dance deliberately; Martin-Nuss is a musician as well as a visual artist, and sound frequently makes its way into her exhibitions. She is particularly interested in the voice and the ways in which disparate voices might merge and diverge. She also sees her mark-making as close kin to musical notation; as such, her paintings solicit a kind of synaesthesia on the part of the viewer/listener.

One can see the wide range of art historical touchstones, deliberately invoked or otherwise, in the works on display: Claude Monet's waterlilies (and the Mitchell paintings that in turn draw on them) in Essence Ascending, 2026; Turner's two versions of Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, c.1834-35, in The Mist of Forms, 2026; John Martin's apocalyptic scenes in Beyond the Light, 2026; and Giorgione's The Tempest, c.1508, in the creation of depth through openings and her centring of maternal experience. But Martin-Nuss is more than the sum of her influences; her work is underpinned by her personal set of philosophical and ethical concerns born out of her own moment. Her practices are informed by (art) history; her preoccupations are decidedly contemporary – the posthuman, the Anthropocene. 

The great nineteenth-century art and social critic John Ruskin once wrote of Turner's rendering of reflections in water, 'though we recognize them in an instant for images of something…we cannot penetrate nor interpret; we are not allowed to go down to them, and we repose, as we should in nature, upon the lustre of the level surface. It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art…consists' (Modern Painters, Volume One, 1843). The posture that Ruskin suggests here is one of humility, one in which the viewer's penetrating gaze is forestalled by the power of art, which at its best, should mimic that of nature. This power belongs to Martin-Nuss's work; it says a great deal and yet will not give its secrets away easily. We may linger, longing to go into the depths of the painting, into the eye created by the aperture, but we are held at bay in an attitude of wonder. The task of the viewers is to relinquish themselves.

Natalie Prizel is a writer and scholar based in New York. From 2021–22 she was Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow in European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies (OUP, 2024) and is currently writing a volume of essays at the intersection of criticism and memoir titled, The Art of Holding. 
Text © Natalie Prizel, 2026