“Where Muses Dare” is the first solo exhibition in Sweden by British artist Sara Berman, hosted by Larsen Warner Gallery. This collection features 12 oil paintings on linen, each exploring the societal constructs that shape the female experience. Through evocative storytelling, Berman’s characters navigate realms of power, reflection, and transformation.

Berman plays with colour, texture, and form, creating melanges of neon pinks and fiery oranges pulsing beneath deep petrol blues and shadowed greens, with bruised surfaces, textured by layers of scraping, smudging, and wiping. Clothing plays a central role in Berman’s work, both as a metaphor for societal expectations and as a literal, tactile element in her process. Drawing from her background in fashion, she sources and inhabits vintage garments, using staged photographic recordings as the foundation for her paintings. In these shifting personas, the artist explores the fluidity of identity, blurring the boundaries between self-portraiture, fiction, and performance.

Through this lens, Where Muses Dare delves into the tensions between personal and collective histories, between authenticity and artifice. Berman’s paintings embody the contradictions of contemporary existence—celebrating, questioning, and confronting the complex realities of gender, power, and selfhood.