A defining gesture sets the show in motion: Crowner has converged all three gallery rooms into one single space by laying an ivory carpet, one that draws an elliptical shape that (imaginarily) expands beyond the exhibition floor. Architecture is not only present as research in the artist’s works, but it is also activated by making us aware of the around and the below of the hanging pieces. Similar immersive strategies are put in place at her institutional shows at Amparo, Chinati, MASS MoCA and MoMA spaces.
Crowner’s titles are instruments offered to navigate her canvas panels*: Charles James and Crimson and Clover (2023) hint to the iconic Four-Leaf Clover Ball Gown, tailored in 1953 by the legendary Anglo-American couturier Charles James. An engineering masterpiece weighing over 10 pounds, the sculptural dress was mathematically structured to flow weightlessly. Club Tropical, Navy and Sky with Corners and Horizontal Drift convey us to a trove of images – moods from a day in tropical modernism: breeze blocks projecting shadows on a concrete floor, giant leaves swaying against a backdrop of blue and brise-soleil.
Architecture, fashion, nature, art history, are all subject to Crowner’s taxonomic process from which magnified details emerge to populate her sewn canvases with the same impetus as the first flowers of spring. In her solemn attentiveness, Crowner takes apart the physical world around her and studies its parts in depth, in a pursuit of understanding what makes it tick; all the while teaching us to appreciate abstraction as craft and nature as technique.
Sarah Crowner was born in Philadelphia in 1974, she currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Over the last year the artist had solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa (USA), Amparo Museum in Puebla (MX), and Auroras/Casa de Vidro in Sao Paulo (BR) with accompanying catalogues. Upcoming projects include "Around Orange" at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, the Hill Art Foundation, NY (USA), and the American Academy in Rome (IT). Major institutional collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, KMAC Museum in Louisville, Carnegie Museum in Dallas, Guggenheim Museum in NY, and the He Art Museum in Guangdong are custodians of her work.
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*As described by Brazilian curator Diego Matos in his essay for the Casa de Vidro/Auroras catalogue (São Paulo, 2023).
