Evan Moffitt reviews the recent exhibition Sarah Awad: Gate Paintings at Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles.

Moffitt writes: "In The Poetics of Space, French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard said of the word 'door' that 'through meaning it encloses, while through poetic expression it opens up.' The same could be said of Awad’s gates and their relationship to the history of painting. If Awad felt fenced in by the opposition of abstraction and figuration, the works in 'Gate Paintings' manage to escape this constricting narrative by refusing to commit to either mode. As much as the paintings seduce with surface beauty, they invite us to break through the picture plane and enter a garden of possibility."