June, 2026. words by chunmbum park. Piece with artist magazine.
Sabrina Puppin, Ph. D., is an Italian-born artist based in New York and Qatar whose abstract paintings explore the abstract nature of reality and the subjectivity of perception, achieved by distorting imagery through abstract colors and patterns.
Initially a painter of realistic portraits depicting African and Middle Eastern women, Dr. Puppin discovered a profound sense of liberation and found her true artistic voice when she began to venture into abstraction.
Abstract art can be said to be the final frontier in terms of the exploration of the visual language, in which the push to uncover the underlying formal relationships of color and space takes over the other concerns or subject matter, such as the narrative elements and the technical requirements of a perspectival space, anatomical representation, etc. of figurative art.
Once abstraction is introduced into the visual language of the artist, the paradigm of art shifts, and the artist is no longer bound by the earthly aims of faithful representation, and the preset notions and conventions; rather the artist must build a rocket ship and escape Earth’s gravity by achieving an escape velocity… by the virtue of abstraction and its powers.
Dr. Puppin is the seeker of abstraction, which for her and preceding artists was a means of deconstructing reality. This is really to say that she uses abstract art to break down reality and examine its parts in hopes of discovering an underlying principle or relationship of color and form. She then utilizes these visual principles to excavate hidden visuals in her human subconscious and the psychological realm of aesthetics. The process is the persistent investigation of the formal language and relationships, and the outcome are the abstract paintings that are built on such a visual and aesthetic system of codes and principles.
It may sound contradictory, hypocritical, or ironic that abstract artists develop abstract art to deconstruct reality to break free from its bounds and presuppositions. And they then give birth to a new aesthetic language or vision of an alternate world that is different from our own, perhaps as a means of critiquing our own world or its status quo. What kind of reality are we talking about here? Most of the time, reality is understood within the terms and observations of a macroscopic human observer, in which objects, beings, and phenomena occupy it and follow the classical rules of physics.
In Dr. Puppin’s paintings, especially the most recent works like “View Through” (2026), we observe the dissolution and breakup of objects and phenomena, which are highlighted and accentuated by the details and outlines of their broken parts. We see the particles break down and clash like those being smashed at the particle accelerators in Geneva.
The artist humbly claims she is not a scientist nor an engineer, and she is uninterested in both scientific topics and spirituality on the conscious level, but her work appears to speak to both, as a means of unifying the two into a coherent philosophical framework. What happens when you break down reality into its smaller parts, and divide up those parts into even smaller parts? In a way, on a metaphorical level, Dr. Puppin is the particle physicist, which is the modern equivalent of a medieval alchemist who had sought the formula that would permit the manufacture of gold.
Memory is an important vehicle by which Dr. Puppin accumulates the bits and pieces of color and patterns on the pictorial plane. She remembers the various details and connects them to other places, places, and events through a subconscious effort to understand the reality that is her lived experiences. For example, in “New York Colors” (2023), we see the colors of the New York taxi. What does the yellow cab mean? What does it symbolize within the context of a city that is a concrete, metal, and glass jungle and often comprises a grey, wintry cityscape? Do they speak to the unbreakable will of the people to pursue business, productivity, and wealth creation no matter the daily obstacles? Does the cadmium yellow dark color of the cab signify digging or the synthesizing of gold? Dr. Puppin’s paintings testify to her evolving consciousness and spiritual attainment, who has observed and remembered the various bits and pieces of her experience and processed them as feelings understood by her intuition.
Intuition plays a huge part for Dr. Puppin because the human mind is free to improvise on new obstacles and evolving situations and problems. The cosmos is unpredictable not only because of its immense scale and structural complexity of the objects, beings, and phenomena contained within it, but also because sentient beings occupy it, and we exercise our free will to move the world. In a literal sense too, when one moves forward, the entire universe moves backward relative to the observer. Always searching for a new direction and exhausting old venues of expression, Dr. Puppin utilizes intuition to introduce variations upon variations of color, form, space, and movement. Dr. Puppin’s intuition comes not only from her own evolving dialogue of past works but also her study of art history and the contemporary art scene.
Dr. Puppin’s practice is an informed one that is aware of its position in the ecosystem of ideas and visions that dot the timeline and the canon of art and human visual achievements. An artist all her life, Dr. Puppin has pursued art and the study of art history with great sincerity and persistent drive, without reservation or regret. She has now produced her strongest works as of yet, and it is only up to us to encounter her work and to experience the joyful merit of her visual experimentation… as the seeker of powerful abstraction.
Piece with Artist MAGAZINE © june 2026
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