ART CITIES: Athens-Sarah Crowner

Sarah Crowner is recognized for her sustained engagement with line, form, color and materiality. Working across a breadth of media, she investigates the relationship between the individual and the whole. In her sewn canvases, Crowner emphasizes the physical act of making as well as the tactility of medium; broad brush strokes swipe across sliced forms that are then sewed and joined back together.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Drawing inspiration from nature or art history, Sarah Crowner’s paintings appear at first as familiar fields of drawn forms and colors. However, as her compositions draw the viewer into the work, the inherent structure reveals that there are no drawn lines, only objects touching each other to form the greater whole across their boundaries. Pointing towards an expanded field of painting, the artist’s oeuvre also incorporates tiled architectures, sculptures, site-specific wall pieces, installations and set design. Collaborations are also an intrinsic part of the practice and Crowner has partnered with performance artists, choreographers, dancers and musicians, chefs, and other artists to further her interest in transforming spaces into three-dimensional experiences and in the ways in which materiality interacts with the body. The collaborative nature of Crowner’s practice also manifests in her engagement with art history. Viewing the canon as a medium in its own right, Crowner continually reinterprets and elevates historic voices. Through the blurring of distinctions between various media and histories, Crowner simultaneously deconstructs existing narratives, and builds new ways of slow and deliberate looking. As the artist says “Much of my work has involved an intense looking, whether it be to the willow tree outside my studio or a Richard Serra drawing, and then to take that act apart and put it back together from parts and fragments… Part of my thinking is quite practical. In the same way that tiling is a pragmatic way to cover a floor surface, so is sewing a pragmatic way to join bodies of canvas and painted color together… The laborious process – the pattern making, cutting, painting, tracing, trimming, sewing, stretching, and then undoing that and doing it all over again – is a way for me to understand painting, both in how I see the world, through the history of art, and in the abstract form itself”. Sarah Crowner’s solo exhibition “Night for day”, in Athens, features new paintings and an immersive, site-specific tile installation. A brilliant yellow hue permeates the gallery’s ground-floor spaces, emanating from a plane of handmade glazed tiles spanning in all directions. Laid in an expansive chevron pattern and set atop a raised wooden platform as if a theatrical stage, “Platform (Yellow terra cotta)” (2024) is immediately visible from the gallery’s entrance: visitors step onto a bright, earthen surface and into a chromatic environment that replicates the color temperature of the intense Hellenic heat, capturing daylight as one might enter the color field of an abstract painting. In the upstairs rooms, sewn paintings composed of interlocking curvilinear shapes hang in contrast to the hard heat below. Deep greens and rich blues saturate soft surfaces and recall illuminated foliage of dense gardens or forests at night. Inverting the title of François Truffaut’s 1973 film “Day for Night”, which was named after the filmmaking technique in which outdoor sequences are filmed in daylight and filtered to appear as if at night, Crowner subtly catalyzes a sequence of light to dark and back again as one travels between gallery floors—a sensory palette that evolves as much between tangible forms as with shifts in natural light throughout the day. Crowner’s architectural interventions, which occupy interior as well as outdoor walls, ceilings, and floors, invite reciprocal explorations of the body’s relationship to painting that are both active and passive, observable and intangible, tactile and ephemeral. In dialogue with the history of painting and its possibilities in the present, she imagines other forms that the medium can take. The various media and disciplines that comprise her unique practice are rooted in the fundamental elements of form, color, and gesture inherent to traditional painting, as well as a preoccupation with space and light, which extends across all of her work. A performance inspired by Crowner’s work, composed by Apostolis Koutsogiannis of Athens’s Oros Ensemble, will take place within the installation during the opening beginning at sunset. Koutsogiannis’s new score investigates the way sound masses can reverberate through space, just as light filters through open windows and reflects off the tiles’ surfaces.

Photo left: Sarah Crowner, Elevation, Dusk or Dawn, 2024 (detail), Acrylic on canvas, sewn, 72 x 90 inches (182.9 x 228.6 cm), © Sarah Crowner, Photo: Maris Hutchinson, Courtesy Gagosian. Photo right: Sarah Crowner, Tropical Nocturnal, 2024 (detail), Acrylic on canvas, sewn, 96 x 72 inches (243.8 x 182.9 cm), © Sarah Crowner, Photo: Maris Hutchinson, Courtesy Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens, Greece, Duration: 14/11/2024-18/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, https://gagosian.com/