Large rainbow colored inflatable star above a smaller rainbow inflatable squash looking object in a large white box gallery.
Claire Ashley (Scottish, born 1971). Clown (Star Patrick), 2019 and Clown (Hot Rock II), 2022. Installation view at Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida, 2024.
Photo: Ryan Gamma.
Large rainbow striped and gradient lumpy inflatables hanging from ceiling and on the floor in a gallery.
Claire Ashley (Scottish, born 1971). Installation view of Claire Ashley: Chromatic Blush at Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida, 2024.
Photo: Ryan Gamma.
Gallery with large columns framing a large inflated star and other flanking inflatables to the left and right.
Claire Ashley (Scottish, born 1971). Installation view of Claire Ashley: Chromatic Blush at Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida, 2024.
Photo: Ryan Gamma.

Claire Ashley: Chromatic Blush

October 20, 2024–January 19, 2025

For over a decade, Scottish-born, Chicago-based artist Claire Ashley (born 1971) has been pushing the boundaries of painting, developing a unique visual language through her vibrant, colorfully painted inflatables. These unconventional sculptural forms are dynamic surfaces for abstract painting, pulsating with raw energy and slapstick humor. Lumpy and colorful, they embrace imperfection and challenge conventional notions of taste, beauty, and fine art. In their two states—deflated and inflated—they mirror the human body’s processes of tension and release, inhale and exhale, offering a compelling metaphor for our own physical existence. Defying traditional categorizations, Ashely’s accessible, good-humored work melds art and life in playful and generous ways while asking provocative questions about cultural norms.

Ashley’s inflatables are also frequently rooted in narrative. In Chromatic Blush, she invites viewers to explore an imagined evolutionary moment in a future terrain where hybrid organisms have evolved out of our time, the Anthropocene. One such creature, the monumental Star Patrick, floats above the ground, its surface so alive with colors that it seems to breathe. Beneath it huddles another smaller piece, like its newborn offspring. Bizarre and voluminous, these and other inflatables both inhabit and sculpt the space into a mountainous landscape filled with their bawdy energy. An evocative soundscape composed by her frequent collaborator, Joshua Patterson, deepens the sensory experience, immersing viewers in Ashley’s fully imagined and tangible future world.

Visitors can feel the boundaries between real and imagined time dissolve as they navigate the installation, sensing their way through a future populated by these radiant, incongruous forms. Ashley’s work celebrates this possibility, offering a vision of a new world in all its messy and glorious complexity. In this space, Ashley’s hybrids invite us to reconsider what it means to be alive—and whether objects can also be alive—in a constantly evolving world.

Ashley’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, site-specific installations, and performances, such as Beacon Arts Center, Scotland (2022); the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, United Kingdom (2021); and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (2019), among many others. Her new augmented reality piece is currently on view at Millennium Park in downtown Chicago as part of Augmented Chicago: Inaugural Realities, a celebration of the park’s 20-year anniversary. Ashley currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator, Sarasota Art Museum.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from:
Platinum Sponsors
Judy and Fred Fiala

Platinum Sponsors
Charlotte and John Suhler

Silver Sponsor
Gerald and Sondra Biller
Huisking Foundation
Audrey and Walter Stewart

Tourist Development Tax Logo
Sarasota Magazine Logo

View more works by Claire Ashley and other Inside Out artists.

Visit Inside Out Page

Artist Statement

Happenings

Large pink playscape on a green lawn with children playing in the foreground

Sarasota Art Museum Announces Installation of New Site-Specific Outdoor Playscape, “Natural Curiosity” 

Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) is pleased
to announce the addition of a new playscape located on the Museum’s Great Lawn. Titled “Natural Curiosity,” this piece will serve as part art installation, part outdoor classroom, inspiring creativity, social connection and well-being for locals, tourists and school students alike.
Designed by Brooklyn, New York-based, award-winning multidisciplinary design studio The
Urban Conga, this inviting, site-specific installation will create a dynamic outdoor respite for Museum visitors, sparking connection with nature and social activity through open-ended play.

Blue Star Museums Program

Sarasota Art Museum is a Blue Star Museum

Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) is pleased to participate in Blue Star Museums, a program that provides free admission to currently serving U.S. military personnel and their families during the summer. The 2026 program will begin on Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 16, 2026, and end on Labor Day, Monday, September 7, 2026.

Skyway 2027 Logo

Call to Artists Announced for Tampa Bay Area Exhibition ‘Skyway 2027: A Contemporary Collaboration’​

Five regional art museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; The John and
Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota;
the Tampa Museum of Art; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, are pleased to
announce a call to artists for “Skyway 2027: A Contemporary Collaboration”, the fourth iteration of the exhibition
celebrating the diversity and talent of artistic practices in the Tampa Bay area and beyond.

Sol LeWitt (1928 - 2007) Loopy Doopy, Blue/Red, 2000 Oil-based woodcut 20 5/8 × 28 5/8 in. (52.3 × 72.6 cm) New Britain Museum of American Art, Gift of Sol LeWitt © Estate of Sol LeWitt 2025

Sarasota Art Museum to Present Major Survey of Prints by Conceptual Art Pioneer Sol LeWitt

Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) is pleased to present “Beautiful Ideas: The Prints of Sol LeWitt,” on view from May 17 through October 25, 2026. This exhibition explores the extensive printmaking career of Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), a leader of the American Minimalism and Conceptual art movements who famously declared that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Woman at a pool club posing with two men playing pool in the background

Sarasota Art Museum Announces its 2026-2027 Season Exhibition Schedule

Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design (SAM) announces its 2026-2027 season, featuring a lineup of seven exhibitions including works by some of the most beloved and influential photographers of the 20th-century, award-winning glass artists, a father and son artistic lineage, multiple Ringling College of Art and Design talents and more.