Sharon Sprung

New York painter Sharon Sprung is known for luminous and life like portraits. Her subjects are wide-ranging and have included accomplished individuals in the fields of business, academia, and government as well as evocative portraits of children and women.

She is known for her significant portrait commissions, most notably the official White House portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, as well as the Congressional portraits of Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink and Representative Jeanette Rankin. For Sprung, "My paintings are a carefully observed negotiation, manipulated layer upon layer, in order to create a work of art as equivalent as possible to the complexity of real life. They are an attempt to control the almost uncontrollable substance that is oil paint, and the equally untamable expression of the human condition." She has had numerous one-person shows in New York at Gallery Henoch in Chelsea, as well as many group shows there and has exhibited widely at museums and universities across the globe. In addition to her inclusion in the White House Collection, Sprung's work is widely collected by public and corporate institutions as well as private collectors. Selected collections include Columbia University, the Federal Courthouse for the Southern District of New York, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, Barnard College, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges.