Sadie LASKA creates frenetic, brightly colored compositions chock-full of evocative icons and slogans rendered with sardonic flair. She invokes the absurdity of contemporary life with coded constructions that reference everything from computer icons to time-worn hieroglyphs for death. Working across painting, sculpture, fabric, and printmaking, collage is the underlying principle of her practice. Laska foregrounds evocative juxtapositions, destroying and creating various meanings as her painted symbols jockey for attention amid a fragmented excess of information. Although frequently her subject matter is drawn from the dark matter of the daily news, Laska insists on humor and pleasure amidst the gloom and doom, always striking a careful balance between life-and-death and tongue-in-cheek. 

Sadie LASKA (b. 1974, Prince, WV) lives and works in Queens, NY. She grew up going to punk shows in West Virginia, where her father was a philosophy professor at West Virginia University. She has frequently used excerpts from her father’s poems in her work. Laska arrived in New York in 1997 where she worked at Dia before moving to Washington, D.C to play in several bands, eventually returning to New York in 2003. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Page Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, France; Soccer Club Club, Chicago; Canada, New York; Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium; 56 Henry, New York; Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg, Geneva, and Paris; and Kerry Schuss, New York, among others. Under the band name IUD, a percussion-based collaboration with Lizzi Bougatsos and others started in 2004, Laska has performed at Kunsthalle, Zurich; MoMA PS1, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Astrup Fearnley, Oslo, Norway; and the Swiss Institute, New York, among others. She curated the exhibition Animal Farm at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut in 2017 and I Am A Scientist at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2018. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2014 and BFA West Virginia University in 1997.