Sequoia Scavullo

Sequoia Scavullo (born in 1995, Baltimore) lives and works in Paris. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris with Mimosa Echard.

The artist creates figurative paintings in varying formats that exist on the edge of abstraction. Elements of fantastic creatures, body parts, or flying insects blur in a superimposition of layers representing textures such as water, hair, or transparent fabric. The artist also experiments with video and sculpture, developing similar formal processes and blurring the frontiers between these mediums.
Scavullo’s compositions repeatedly refer to her personal history and dreams. In the Taino culture from which her family is originated, dream and waking states are not distinguished; the artist draws significant inspiration from the traditional techniques of dream analysis and the culture’s holistic approach to the world at large. Where Western medicine conventionally considers the health of the mind and body separately, Taino healing practices consider the constitution of the human being as a whole. For Scavullo, a recurring theme of water represents a fluidity between reality and dream, between life and death, past and present, and non-human and human worlds.
Central to her work is a reflection on non-verbal communication. The artist created her own symbolic alphabet, elements of which appear in the majority of her paintings. In this way, the artist generates a new language while reminding us that painting, as an artistic language, has the ability to convey emotions more complex than words can express.

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Sequoia Scavullo has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Bielefeld (2022); Pigment Sauvage, Baltimore (2019). In June 2023, she will have a solo show at Sans titre, Paris and a solo presentation at Paris+ by Art Basel with Sans titre.

Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at FRAC Corsica (2023); After Hours, Paris (2023); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2022); Exo Exo, Paris (2022); POUSH - Manifesto, Paris (2021); Haimney Gallery, Barcelona (2020); La Volonté, Paris (2020); Dorchester Art Gallery, Boston (2019); Piano Craft Gallery, Boston (2019); High Zero Foundation, Baltimore (2019); Barbara and Steve Grossman Gallery, Boston (2019); Yale Norfolk Galleries (2019).

The artist received the Diptyque price for contemporary art, curated by Jérôme Sans (2022); the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Prize (2021); the Dean’s Research Award (2019); the Dona Pond Painting Award (2019) and the Will and Elena Barnet Painting Award (2017).

She has participated in the KHIAL NKHEL residency program, Morocco (2018) and the Yale Norfolk program, Ellen Battell Stoeckel (2017).