Playing the Fool – Sara Berman

In Playing the Fool, London-based artist Sara Berman (b. 1975, UK) invites viewers into intimate proximity with the human form. Through large-scale paintings and smaller works on paper, Berman explores identity, performance, and the politics of representation, using the figure of the Harlequin to disrupt and reclaim the traditionally feminine space of portraiture.

Originally trained in fashion at Central Saint Martins before earning her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2016, Berman approaches painting with a deep sensitivity to fabric and form. Her brushwork mimics the structural rhythm of textiles, voking the warp and weft of woven cloth and blurs the boundaries between surface, costume, and skin.

At the heart of the exhibition are two large-scale paintings, Crotch (2025) and Tuck (2025), which focus on the gloved hands and midsection of a figure adjusting a vivid yellow-and-red striped costume. These cropped, ambiguous views evoke the Fool, a trickster figure long associated with theatrical performance and coded costume. Berman reimagines the Fool through a feminist lens, drawing on her own image in self-portraits that question how identity is performed, constructed, and constrained.

Berman’s process is both physical and introspective. She often begins her paintings with a diamond-patterned underpainting, referencing the traditional Harlequin and its subversive connotations. This pattern is later smudged, erased or painted over, echoing the ways in which female identity is layered, masked, and rewritten across time. Beneath her muted palette lies a quiet resistance, an emotional depth that speaks to vulnerability, strength, and the tension between visibility and concealment.

Surrounding the central canvases is a suite of smaller paintings and works on paper, many in blue tones, that continue Berman’s exploration of the jester motif. These works reveal faces that are at once expressive and enigmatic. Each one reflects Berman’s fascination with the ways we simultaneously reveal and disguise ourselves, using dress, gesture and gaze to navigate public and private selves.
With a practice rooted in self-portraiture, costume, and craft, Berman challenges the viewer to look beyond appearances. Playing the Fool is a compelling meditation on identity, artifice, and the power of paint to hold complexity and contradiction.

Crotch (2025)
100cm x 100cm
Oil on Linen

Fencer (2025)
37cm x 28.5cm
Oil on Linen

Parry (2025)
37cm x 28.5cm
Oil on Linen

Untitled (2025)
29.6cm x 21cm
Pen on Paper

Untitled (2025)
30.4cm x 22.8cm
Pen on Paper

Crotch (2025)
37cm x 28.5cm
Oil on Linen

Side-eye (2025)
37cm x 28.5cm
Oil on Linen

The-Conductor (2025)
37cm x 28.5cm
Oil on Linen

Tuck (2025)
37cm x 28.5cm
Oil on Linen

Tuck (2025)
100cm x 80cm
Oil on Linen

Untitled (2025)
30.4cm x 22.9cm
Pen on Paper

Untitled (2025)
30.4cm x 22.8cm
Pen on Paper

The Arts Club is grateful to the artists, lenders and gallery teams for their generosity and collaboration on this exhibition. The show is curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes of Wedel Art.

Ante Room, The Arts Club
Installation courtesy of Gander & White.

For all enquiries, please contact: Wedel Art at email@wedelart.com