Sarah Jacobs (b. 1984) is an American artist who uses symbolism to explore the experience of living without answers to existential questions. Jacobs is a multimedia painter, incorporating oil, digital collage of painted elements, photos of body-painted figures, and more into her pieces. Her most recent series Cave, The Mystery and Carnival embody the chaotic nature of life, the wonders of the world, and the complexity of human connection. Jacobs writes that they express “noise, complexity, and entanglements of being alive by depicting the things that make life good in overwhelmingly maximalist, entangled compositions that suggest a state of existential unease”. Jacobs uses digital collage to create a surreal feeling in her artworks. Motifs that are impossible to be together are intertwined, creating a pattern. Plants on top of other plants, colours within another colour, pattern of the tablecloth continuing onto the figure’s hands. The familiar physics does not apply in Jacob’s paintings. As the viewers look at the pieces, a sense of ambiguity rises, that there is no foreground or background as they’re all jumbled together. Contrasting with the bright and vivid colours, the delicately and precisely arranged pieces of motifs come together to create an almost spiritual experience on the canvas. Jacob uses various symbolism in her artworks. This is one of the factors that was inspired by Baroque paintings with dramatic style, rich colours, and bold lighting schemes. She uses both traditional European motifs, but also new modern symbols. She states that she has used “red poppies to symbolize death and saplings to symbolize birth,” and for nontraditional symbols she often included chess pieces to show human drama. Like such, there is an abundance of clues to how even the smallest things in her paintings can have meaning. As the audience looks through the multifaceted paintings, the viewers are invited to seek for the symbols and cues as if they are looking at a mystery case. This allows the viewers to be the ones asking questions with the painter herself. Jacobs is Pennsylvania Dutch and received her MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2010. Her maximalist, surreal, and figurative artworks have been exhibited in the US and in Europe and are in public and private collections in the US, UK, and Hong Kong. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions in New York City, London, Wrocław, Poland and Bristol, England, among other cities, and has won multiple grants, including the Arts Council England Grant. She is represented in the Pittsburgh region by Zynka Gallery.