NYAB Event - Sarah Crowner “Everywhere the Line is Looser”

Sarah Crowner “Everywhere the Line is Looser”

Casey Kaplan

This event has ended.

Casey Kaplan presents an exhibition by Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia), Everywhere the Line is Looser, the artist’s first with the gallery.

Crowner’s paintings rest equally in form as they do in method – patterns are drawn, painted, cut, sewn and stretched, in a process that intimately connects a composition with its making. Shapes are repeated, reversed, rotated, and cropped, enacting a play between purpose and practicality. Lines are created by joining panels of canvas together, thereby displaying the surface’s sewn construction. Through mirroring and fragmentation, Crowner brings our attention to the works’ subtleties. For example, Rotated Two-Way Arabesque shows what appears to be the same shape repeated across a trio of canvases, yet as they progress sequentially slight differences in coloration and brushwork are revealed.

Many of the fundamental, lyrical forms within the exhibition find inspiration in a Harper’s Bazaar fashion shoot from 1957. Photographed in black and white, the female models’ bodies and clothing have synergy with the graphic backdrops constructing the scenes: a curve of the waistline in the foreground of one woman merges into the calligraphic line of the background. In this new body of work, the figure becomes an integral material with graphic potential, mirroring the flatness of the backdrops.

Central to Crowner’s practice is research into the history of 20th century abstraction and modernist design, as well as an obvious penchant for textile production. Rooted in these various lineages, Crowner’s works display a contradiction: they are as much paintings as they are objects. Each composition withdraws from the original sources while at the same time reveals an intimate connection in their handmade quality. The effect is simultaneously one of reverence and irreverence.

Everywhere the Line is Looser additionally marks the first exhibition in which Crowner displays works from an ongoing series referred to as monochromes. These surfaces are assembled from the raw canvas remnants and negatives of former compositions, and act as registers of the labor, movement, and action of Crowner’s practice in the studio. Presented always in painted, handmade supports, they bring attention to the potential of our relationship to material and form.

Sarah Crowner’s work is currently on view in Repetition and Difference, curated by Jens Hoffman and Daniel Palmer at the Jewish Museum, New York. In 2016, her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Mass Moca, North Adams, MA. Crowner’s work has additionally been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2014; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2013; WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, 2013; ICA Philadelphia, 2013; Zacheta National Museum of Art, Warsaw, 2013; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013; and the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Crowner’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.