Mystery Guests, Sahara Longe

Sahara Longe's richly coloured paintings reveal strange, unsettling parties.

Spurred by her love of Agatha Christie’s detective novels, British-Sierra Leonean artist Sahara Longe began to paint her own mystery stories. Her resulting oils depict ambiguous, unsettling moments of social interaction. ‘Each painting is a mystery where you have to work out what’s going on,’ she says. A new body of work, set to appear at Frieze London next month, explores the party as a locus for these tensions and frissons.

Using a palette of vermillion red, black, rose and raw emerald evocative of Van Dyck and Rubens (Longe trained at Florence’s Charles Cecil painting school), the paintings illustrate her fictional party guests’ subconscious desires and discomforts: awkwardly knotted hands, admiring gazes, cross-fired glances. ‘I never really got the idea that it (painting) was about your feeling and dreams,’ she says. ‘I always liked the idea that it was a story – I like creating a weird story.’