“Did you have any of those cocktails? They were lethal. I feel dreadful, but it was so fun!” It’s 11 a.m. the morning after the opening party to celebrate “New Shapes,” Sahara Longe’s first solo show at esteemed London gallery Timothy Taylor, and the artist is nursing a hangover. But it’s a happy one. “I had a great time!” says Longe. Even a sartorial disaster on the night didn’t dampen her mood. “Oh my God,” she tells me conspiratorially, “So you remember the Vivienne Westwood dress I was wearing? I knew it was too small but I bought it anyway. And then yesterday I hugged someone and the zip popped. I suddenly felt this release… It was awful,” she adds with a chortle.
At 29, Longe, known for her semi-abstract figures painted in rich tones, is fast becoming one of the hottest talents on the art scene, with insiders touting her as the next Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. In fact, the expectations for “New Shapes” were palpably high, particularly considering that Longe’s solo booth at Frieze last October was both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. To wit: everything sold out.
But Longe not only met people’s expectations for “New Shapes”; she exceeded them. Her collection of gargantuan portraits of people in everyday social settings are rendered in a newly geometric style, hence the title of the show. It marks a slight departure from her previous work—Longe describes it as “much more stripped back, with less detail”—and it is a triumph.
“For this [show], I was looking at a lot of street scenes by various artists and how they depicted people just walking by…you know, when you walk past people in the street and you sort of look at them and wonder who they are and what their lives are like? It’s about that sort of weird interaction.” She cites German expressionist Ernst Kirchner as an inspiration (“His paintings are amazing. I mean, some of them are quite hostile, but they set the scene”) as well as Kandinsky (“I read this essay he wrote about how paintings should be like a song and the way you use lines should be like parts of the song. I found that so cool, so I use lines to help move the eye around the canvas”). Much of the overarching inspiration, however, came from the industrialist British painter L. S. Lowry. “My dad really likes him,” she says fondly. “So I was looking at how he basically did all these street scenes, in which the figures are really sort of flat, no detail at all, but they have such character in their posture and their faces. I remember someone telling me that you can recognize someone you know just by the back of them, just by the way they stand and by the way they use their hands. So I wanted to do something that simplified the process as much as Lowry did, but kept the character and told the story.”
That said, not all of Longe’s reference points are quite as highbrow; she’s equally inspired by the party-loving crowd in Brixton, where her studio is located. “Sometimes I would work really, really late, and I’d be shuffling home, and there would always be concerts at the O2 or people going out on Brixton Road, and I’d see all these people in the lights. The colors and what people were wearing always kind of affected me. I, on the other hand, was always in my horrid studio clothes, and everyone was having a really nice time,” she deadpans.
I point out that all of the influences she has mentioned thus far—including Francis Bacon—are male. “Yes,” she agrees thoughtfully. “I was actually pondering that recently.” However, she concludes that it’s purely coincidental—saying she simply finds the work of those particular artists “honest,” and that it’s no indication of a dearth of connection with women (“It’s so important to have that community”). She has four sisters, all of whom she is close to, and has formed a tight-knit community of female creatives and artists, which include gallery director Georgia Carr, designer Jess Wheeler, and the artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan, whom she met at a residency run by author Katy Hessel. Longe credits Yearwood-Dan with helping her understand the art business, “because you can end up being taken for a ride,” and she remains Longe’s first port of call for advice. “She’s incredible—and she doesn’t take any shit,” she adds with a chuckle.
Looking back, it seemed Longe was always destined to paint. Both her grandfathers—one Sierra Leonean, the other English—were painters. Moving with her family from London, where she was born, to rural Suffolk as a child also had an impact. “We moved to this falling-down farmhouse that no one did up, so my parents said, “You can decorate the rooms as you want.” So I drew all over my bedroom wall. My dad used to read Private Eye magazine, and I loved the cartoons in there, so I used to copy them every day. I had so much fun just graffitiing all over the house.”
Still, her career as an artist wasn’t a foregone conclusion. After leaving Heathfield School in Berkshire, she enrolled at Bristol University to study art history, but after realizing she was “really bad at writing essays,” dropped out after less than a year. Eavesdropping on a stranger’s conversation in a café about the Charles Cecil atelier in Florence turned out to be “life-changing.” She googled it, realized “this is exactly what I want to do,” and in 2015 headed to the prestigious painting school, where she spent the next four years. It’s an experience she describes as “tough, and probably a bit weird, but I loved the discipline and the complete madness of the whole thing. People would leave all the time as it was quite hard, but I just love that it really teaches you how to paint.” She left in 2019, but success was slow to follow. “Most people who go to Charles Cecil leave and do portrait commissions. But if you’re not really, really good, then you’re never going to make it. And I wasn’t very, very good,” she says matter-of-factly. It’s a statement many would disagree with, but she insists: “I was very slow, and so I found it very difficult.”
And so she went to Sierra Leone for five months and came back to Suffolk just as lockdown was about to hit. “And I just kind of gave it up. I was like, God, this is so tough, maybe I’ll do something else.” It was a year before she started painting again “just for myself,” with social media ultimately leading her back to the art world. “Everyone was on Instagram and looking at work, and that’s when people were like, ‘I really like this,’ and I actually started selling stuff.” During that time, she also messaged numerous galleries about representation; while most failed to respond, Ed Cross did, with Timothy Taylor following. “Nowadays, I sit next to people at fancy dinners and suddenly realize I messaged them on Instagram and they didn’t reply,” she says, sounding slightly horrified. “So I quickly go and delete the DM!”
To say those galleries must be kicking themselves now is an understatement. Longe’s large pieces command six figures, and there’s an endless line of ardent collectors waiting to get their hands on her work. “I know, it is quite cool,” she agrees somewhat sheepishly. “I’m still so shocked that anyone actually wants to buy anything.”
In September, Longe will be showing a new set of paintings at Frieze Seoul. “They are much smaller works that are pretty much done—they just need finishing touches.” She hopes to get some friends to come over during the fair “so we can go to a K-pop concert,” she says laughing. In the meantime, she’s heading to her studio to tidy it up. “It’s so bad, it’ll probably take me all day just clearing up the empty cans of Coke…”
And her reward for all her hard work? “I might go to Thorpe Park.” She knows that her eagerness to visit a touristic theme park usually associated with kids and tourists might sound ridiculous to most. “But honestly,” she says with a smile, “it’s like my favorite place in the world. I absolutely love rollercoaster rides.” Which is just as well—because, right now, Sahara Longe is on the ride of her life.