The Saddest Circle is a Square, Sara Graham’s sixth solo exhibition at MKG127 is the result of Graham’s exploration of the cut-out and the off-cast. Graham has pushed further into her persistent artistic preoccupations with drawing and collage, drawing lines, cutting, cutting out, rearranging, layering and repeating the process over and over again.

The drawings in this exhibition feature circles cut up in different ways and, utilizing collage’s characteristics of disruption and distortion to create an uneasy whole. For Graham, the most interesting part of the collage is at the edge where one element meets another in an improvisational game of chance and intuition. The hand moves the paper, shifts the brush stroke, breaks the line and makes the space, as one shape makes another shape, as one circle makes a square and a square frustrates a circle.

The intent of The Saddest Circle is a Square, borrowing from Ellsworth Kelly, is to provide some ‘eye-work’. This work is informed by Graham’s daily observations of the urban forms as spaces and places interpolate as one moves through a city. Points of views are constantly improvised. While the act of looking and walking in and through cities have always played an important part in Graham’s practice, the local circumstances of the global pandemic increased her observations of the minutiae of the landscapes outside in the city and inside the studio she occupies from most-of-the-time-to-time. The lines and shapes of the world outside of the studio have been gathered in the minds-eye and they come together in the studio with materials at hand and within arm’s reach at the scale of the page on the drawing table.