Sarah Crowner

Sarah Crowner.JPG

Garden Sculpture Blue, 2018 and Garden Sculpture Grey, 2018

Sagaponack

Sarah Crowner (1974) is an American artist.

Inspired by organic forms found in nature, Sarah Crowner renders color, line, and pattern into unique abstractions that play with positive and negative space. She is best known for geometric paintings made from raw or acrylic-painted canvases that are then cut, re-stretched, collaged, and sewn back together. In addition to the natural world, Crowner’s visual language references midcentury modernist abstraction, particularly in her installations and recent exploration of three-dimensional forms. In Garden Sculpture Blue and Garden Sculpture Grey—benches meant to be used as public seating—the pastel blue and gray tactile, bulbous forms allude to the abstract tree shapes in the architectural sketches of Paulo Mendes da Rocha, a Brazilian architect known for his innovative use of concrete. Crowner says that she was interested in “turning soft botanical forms … into the architect’s medium, concrete,” as well as in the “bird’s-eye view” of the shapes—flattening and then making them three-dimensional again

Solo exhibitions include

  • Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016–17)

  • Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2016 (commissioned installation)  

Group exhibitions include

  • Whitney Biennial, NY (2010)

  • Abstract Generation: Now in Print, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013)

  • Excursus IV: Primary Information, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2013)

  • Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013)

  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2014)

  • Jewish Museum, New York (2015)

  • The Flag Art Foundation, NY (2015)

Articles

Brooklyn’s Sarah Crowner Is Reinvigorating American Painting - Vogue

SARAH CROWNER, GARDEN SCULPTURE BLUE AND GARDEN SCULPTURE GREY