Sandra Cavanagh
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 26
- 4 min read
Sandra Cavanagh’s work draws on personal history, myth, and political memory. Growing up in Argentina under military rule shaped her approach to painting as both a form of resistance and record-keeping. Her figurative series often center on themes like war, power, and gender, while also turning attention to the quiet rituals of daily life. She works in extended series, allowing each subject to develop through repetition and variation. Cavanagh lives and works in New York.
Q: You grew up in Argentina during political repression. How does that early distrust of authority show up in your work today?
A: That early experience of unbridled military power in government bore me an interest in an activist, courageous, opinionated art, art that resists the pressures to conform, that is both innovator and a record keeper of its time and place. Much of my work is motivated by this interest, and it’s in this vein that I hope to resist tame representations, to produce work that is both singular and honest. In this sense too, my starting point finds antecedents in generations of artists who have not shied away from addressing themes of suffering, war and strife alongside those of beauty and good sentiment.
Q: In "Death of Hector I & II" you bring myth into the present. Why do you think myth still helps us talk about violence?
A: Myth provides an allegorical framework for psychological events, it lends us a third eye and a long view. It has endured in popular culture across generations, and presented a form in which to contextualize public afflictions and psychological processes equally.
Core elements of these ancient stories appear in disparate and unconnected traditions, persist and are made use of still. They are continually retold today in film, TV, gaming and literature. Not only are they a link with the past, they’re enormously useful in exposing the perennial nature of certain dangers we face as members of a community and our puzzlement and frustrations over tendencies we seem unable to control. Moreover, through their persistence they quite wonderfully reveal our efforts to understand our nature, behavior and experience from the very first signs of recorded culture.
Q: Your work often looks at mortality, injustice, and gender inequality. How do you know when a subject is worth painting?
A: The choices are rather instinctive, and a little compulsive. At the centre is an understanding that my experience and feelings are echoed in others, whether compassion, outrage, humour, grief, love etc. One has a feeling about an event or series of events, one’s mind turns it over, it becomes an idea, a drawing, an image, then the execution of the work is a way to look at it straight, and to show up. Private preoccupation or experience is made public and shared, art would have no meaning otherwise except as a form of navel gazing, but even navel gazing is common as dust. However small, secret, quotidian, pretty or ugly, complex or simple, the subject of every work of art holds some relationship to our living experience, and in this respect I believe there is no subject that cannot become the reason for making art.
Q: In "After Eden II, Fratricide" you deal with war and state power. What made you want to tell that story in paint?
A: Quite simply the current wars, the "After Eden" series began as an exposé of what I perceived to be the appalling facts underpinning the violence of human upon human, of communities endangered by ambition for power and covetous greed.
In the original telling, literally read, harmony is first upended by the expulsion of the first beings from a blissful if autocratic kingdom, and further by the hard not to see manipulative act of the power above, resulting in the violent slaying of one brother by another motivated by jealousy and envy. The dead brother has no descendants, the male bloodline of the surviving brother is wiped out by a flood ordered by the power above. Laid bare is that regrettably fundamental instinct of man to gain power over another to fatal conclusion, and the overbearing nature of an authority over the lives of its subjects, as sadly played out throughout human history.
Q: You often work in series, returning to the same theme again and again. What does that repetition give you?
A: Every subject brings its own narrative, stream and path to conclusion. I imagine the development of a novel to run along those lines. The form of a series does just that, it develops the subject narrative to its end, a point of natural exhaustion after which further labour is redundant. At that point, the work is done and one moves on to the next thing.
Q: Your paintings mix personal history with social issues. How do you see that balance shaping your work now?
A: I kicked off this year with a painting of the painter and her muse. The muse in her case is Eden, a story. She is in her studio, holding brush and palette while facing and contemplating her own oeuvre, a large painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden. I painted elements of my own studio, easel, work table, materials etc. in direct reference to my own process and the fact of a storied myth at the heart of its creativity.
Then I began a series on the very ordinary process of dressing and the business of looking in the mirror, which is intimate and deliberate, and affords an individual the choice of how to present themselves to others. Considering this action of choosing clothes as a means for self-definition or concealment, I was partly drawn to the subject in terms of finding meaning in a quotidian event, and partly for the sometime effort involved in making it a radical act. Rooted in the challenges of being seen, "The Dressing Room" series affirms a kind of freedom over societal stereotypes related to origin, class, and gender.
