Reflections

By Sarah Jacobs

Holstein Gallery

On View February 12th, 2026 — February 14th, 2027

Sarah Jacobs’s paintings navigate existential questions. Her works express the joy, complexity, and entanglements of being alive by depicting valued moments and objects in surrealist compositions that suggest a state of curiosity. While she often creates new symbols, she at times also incorporates traditional European motifs. For example, her red poppies symbolize death and saplings represent birth. Nontraditional symbols have included chess pieces that are emblematic of human drama, medicopters portraying tragedy, and tomatoes suggesting negative audience reactions to a play. Her paintings have a Baroque-inspired dramatic style that include rich colors, bold lighting schemes, and symbolism. In her patterned pieces, repetition and lushness create a “sumptuously jumbled aesthetic used to bewitch and confuse.”

Sarah Jacobs is a contemporary maximalist and surrealist painter and muralist. Represented by Fremin Gallery in NYC and Zynka Gallery in Pittsburgh, she has taken part in artist residencies in North and South America and Europe. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in New York City, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, London, Wrocław, Poland and Bristol, England. Jacobs studied Art History at Gettysburg College and received her MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2010. In 2014, she moved back to the US after living in London and Bristol, UK where she became a naturalized British citizen. She was an art professor before going into business for herself, and currently lives and paints in Gettysburg, PA.