PRESS RELEASE

Primary is pleased to present Precision Machine, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Minneapolis-based artist Sara Suppan.

In Precision Machine, Suppan turns her attention to the conditions of making: the tools that measure, the minutes that pass, the repetitions that form practice. The artist positions herself as both creator and machine—precise in pursuit of what can never be entirely held.

The paintings operate in tension: skillful renderings paired with unruly subjects, beauty tempered by humor, and seriousness edged with the absurd. Their tone is slippery, deliberate, askew. They conjure a world outside of time, where old and new collapse into one another, and creation is figured as an endless loop of effort, error, and return.

Beneath this is a meditation on failure—on the futility and necessity of trying again. Suppan’s images linger in the space between the disciplined and the undone, asking what it means to pursue clarity when distortion is inevitable. They remind us that every act of making is also an act of reaching, of sending a signal in the hope that someone, somewhere, might receive it.

At the heart of Precision Machine is a simple but profound proposition: that art is not only about what is seen, but about what moves between us. However imperfect, the connection matters most.

Opens Saturday, October 18, 2025 at 5 PM
Closes November 15, 2025


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Sara Suppan (b. 1994) is a painter most interested in beauty undercut by frivolity. She lives in Minneapolis and has recently had solo shows with Micki Meng (San Francisco), Moosey (United Kingdom), and Weinstein Hammons (Minneapolis). Sara has participated in group exhibitions with Hashimoto Contemporary (New York, Los Angeles), Kutlesa (Switzerland), and Huxley-Parlour (London), among others. Sara has displayed at the NADA Miami, Untitled Miami, and CAN Ibiza art fairs with Micki Meng, Huxley-Parlour, and Moosey, respectively. She was a resident artist at Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria, 2019) and Moosey (United Kingdom, 2023), has been published twice in New American Paintings magazine (no. 155 and 173), and has received multiple grants for her work. Sara received her BFA in painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2015.

Primary (Est. 2007) is a context and research-driven curatorial collective with an emphasis on public art. We thrive amongst the self-taught, working-class misfits, who explore the margins of a new Americana through pungent, human-focused narratives. Our program engages with the raw and uncanny, celebrating border voices, bootleg culture, and intergenerational commentary, connecting the new and unseen with broader audiences and evolving collections.

For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com