Sandra Encaoua has spent two decades asking a question that most painters approach from a different angle. The question is not what paint can do to a surface, but what a surface can hold of a human being.
Encaoua is a Franco-American artist born in Paris in 1974, now based in France with an established artistic presence in the United States. Through her studio practice and art label ENCAOUA Fine Art, she works in oil and watercolor across a body of work she calls TransExpressionist, a term she uses to describe the movement of interior emotional states into visual form. The goal, as she describes it, is not to illustrate emotion but to make it present in the painting itself, the way a space can carry a mood before any of the specifics arrive.
Three Series, One Argument
The work is organized around three ongoing series, each approaching that project from a different angle.
“Earth’s Memory” begins with landscape. The paintings in this group are not scenic records of places visited but something closer to the signature of geological time, surfaces that carry the weight of their own making. “Passing Through” moves inward, to human emotion in its least composed state: grief, desire, the turbulence that passes through a person before it settles into memory. The third series, “Judaica,” took shape as Encaoua’s attention moved toward history, specifically toward the history of the Jewish people and the question of how historical violence can be transcended rather than simply endured.
The three overlap in practice. A canvas from any of the series might carry recognizable images or dissolve into pure gesture, sometimes in the same work. She uses palette knife alongside brush, builds oil in layers that dry at different rates, and approaches watercolor separately, with a different kind of attentiveness. Each painting, according to Encaoua, is accompanied by a sentence or literary quotation chosen to open the work to the viewer rather than close it down.
Two Continents, One Exhibition Record
Encaoua has been showing work in the United States and Europe since the early 2010s. Her paintings were listed in the Artprice market database, an independent benchmark for the contemporary art market, beginning in 2012.
Her exhibition history since then runs from Miami and Fort Lauderdale to Paris, including exhibitions at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, satellite events during Art Basel Miami Beach week in 2017 and 2018, and the Centre Européen du Judaïsme in Paris in 2025. In February 2025, she also participated in a two-person exhibition at the prestigious Château des Tourelles in France, alongside sculptor Stephane Daireaux.
She is a member of the Jewish Art Salon in New York and the Taylor Foundation in Paris.
Awards from the period include, per her exhibition record, the medal of the Académie des Arts-Sciences-Lettres of Paris in 2017, the painting prize of the Wellington Art Society in 2021, and first prize in painting from the City of Pembroke Pines, Florida, the following year for her Passing Through series. In 2020, she received an art grant administered by Locust Projects, Miami’s long-running alternative art space, through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ regional regranting program.
Putting It in Print
Alongside the painting, Encaoua publishes. In 2022, she released [LoVE?], a volume pairing roughly 60 original drawings and watercolors with literary texts chosen to resonate with the images. The subject is love as emotional experience, its capacity to unmoor a person as much as to anchor them. In 2024 came [Oct 7], assembled in the year following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. The book brings together around 50 drawings and watercolors made across that year, each accompanied by a literary passage, working through the disorientation and grief of that period one page at a time.
A third book is in preparation. Encaoua describes it as drawing on the Hebrew concept of [Lekh Lekha], the instruction given to Abraham to leave the familiar and go toward the unknown, as a frame for the personal project of becoming oneself.
Teaching and What Comes Next
Running parallel to all of this is a teaching practice. Through her painting and drawing classes in the Paris area, in Nogent-sur-Marne, Saint-Maur, and Le Perreux, Encaoua leads sessions for adults several days a week, working across oil, watercolor, acrylic, and palette knife. She also offers corporate painting evenings and private lessons.
She serves as artistic director of Éditions des Auteurs Francophones, a Paris-based publishing house, where she designs book covers for works in the French literary tradition, and has illustrated for publications addressing prison conditions and ecumenical religious dialogue.
Upcoming exhibitions are scheduled for the Salon des Artistes du Val de Marne at Villa Medicis from September 12 to 27, 2026, followed by the Visites des Ateliers d’Artistes in Saint Maur on October 3 and 4, 2026.
Original paintings from ENCAOUA Fine Art’s three series are available through the studio website and through Saatchi Art, Singulart, and Drouot, where they have been tracked on the secondary market since 2012.
Encaoua’s longer-term aim is to establish TransExpressionism as a recognized international movement, one that treats painting not simply as a picture, but a language capable of carrying the emotional and spiritual dimensions of human experience.
