American painter Sarah Crowner (born 1974) revisits the art historical legacy of abstract painting in a language of collage and domestic craft, piecing together gorgeous geometric abstractions and vibrant color fields out of stitched-together cloth fragments of different colors. “It’s a way of creating form by joining material,” Crowner says of her process. “They are really objects more than paintings.”
Sarah Crowner: Patterns is the second artist’s book in a series that Crowner has been developing around the formal aspects of her painting practice; the first was 2012’s Format. In this publication, Crowner devotes her attention to patterns from a range of sources: from those found in nature and the built environment to fashion and the plastic arts. Juxtaposed throughout this selection are images from Crowner’s recent work, specifically her recent paintings, murals and tiled floors.
The paintings of New York artist Sarah Crowner (born 1974) have offered a new slant on the constructedness of the abstract-geometric painting as developed by Max Bill, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Elizabeth Murray. Crowner sews together painted panels of canvas, raw linen and monochromatic fabrics, introducing a handmade touch to modernist aesthetics that often espoused the minimizing of the artist’s hand. Crowner’s first large-scale artist’s book extends this instinct for materiality to her vast archive of ephemera (magazines, publications, posters) from the 1920s through the 1940s, which she deploys here as a source material for the creation of new images that are built up through imposition, extraction, collaging and printing. Much like her paintings, the resulting works are geometrical and optical abstractions that bring fresh vigor to the tradition on which Crowner draws.
Sarah Crowner: Format