Samples for costumes designed by Sarah Crowner for Jessica Lang World Premiere ballet JESSICA LANG WORLD PREMIERE FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 7:30PM DAVID H. KOCH THEATRE PERFORMANCES: OCTOBER 19 - 28 A new work by Jessica Lang will receive its World Premiere on Friday, October 19. Lang’s new work, her third for ABT, will feature scenery and costumes by American artist Sarah Crowner and lighting by Nicole Pearce. The ballet will be given six performances during ABT’s Fall season. Sarah Crowner, Sliced Tropics, oil on canvas, 194 x 268” / 492.76 x 680.72cm OCTOBER 13, 2018 - MARCH 25, 2019 We are thrilled to announce the participation of gallery artist Sarah Crowner in the 57th Edition of the Carnegie International. The International will open on October 13, 2018 and run through March 25, 2019. However, the Inter- national is already under way, with expanding research and creative documentation along with a highly crafted curatorial process, public programs, commissioned essays, and immersive site visits. Established in 1896 as the Annual Exhibition, the Carnegie International initially focused almost solely on painting. By 1955, the show had adopted a triennial schedule and, in 1958, it became known as the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture, a title it retained until 1970. After an interruption in the 1970s, the exhibition resumed in 1977 and 1979 as the International series, single-artist shows intended as a parallel to the Nobel Prize for the arts. In 1982, it reappeared as the Carnegie International, and has been mounted every three to five years since. After the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International is the oldest international survey exhibition in the world. SARAH CROWNER WEEDS FEBRUARY 26 - APRIL 21, 2018 Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce Weeds, an exhibition of new paintings and a site-specific installation by Sarah Crowner, marking the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. For the exhibition, Crowner presents a suite of paintings staged above a curved, wooden platform, that mirrors the elemental, semi-circular shapes contained by her compositions. In a continued synthesis of form, production and process, each painting is comprised of individual segments of canvas that are cut, collaged and sewn back to- gether. With this new series, Crowner draws from organic and botanical forms of nature — specifically the weeds that grow outside her studio, creep through the cracks of sidewalks, and otherwise colonize the industrial archi- tecture around her neighborhood. To the artist, weeds can be thought of as a politicized and even feminist sym- bol, representative of a rebellious and resilient ethos. Weeds are contextually invasive and persist despite anthro- pogenic obstacles and attempts at eradication. This freedom and willfulness, as observed in nature uncultivated, became both a literal and metaphorical model for the work. From this inspiration, biomorphic shapes are drawn on canvas with a semi-circular template, rendered in saturated color tones, and arranged into spatial abstractions. These arrangements are stretched and unstretched, cut, sliced, and then sewn back together and stretched again - a laborious process that explores a perpetual array of compositional possibilities. In a departure from previous works, the new paintings pair color against color, rather than incorporating white or raw canvas to stabilize the foreground. Each composition contains a nearly overwhelming tonal proximity, height- ened by assertive and tactile brushwork. Dense colors vibrate and compete within the picture plane. Individual forms within each work are not only differentiated by color, but also by the visible seams that simultaneously bind and divide them. These sewn sutures further accentuate the paintings as physical, constructed objects, rather than flattened, two-dimensional images. The canvases are presented in direct dialogue with the site-specific, curvilinear platform, which functions as both an extension of the gallery architecture and an expansion of the paintings’ formal investigations. Originally inspired by the concrete canopy of the 1952 Carlo Scarpa designed Sculpture Garden of the Italian Pavilion at the Giar- dini in Venice, Crowner reimagines a dense overhead object into lightweight, floor-bound plywood staging. The platform does not cover the entire gallery floor, but rather exists as cut-out shapes, creating negative and positive forms that mirror the paintings adjacent. Reciprocal curves and geometric edges encourage the viewer to navigate the gallery as if physically exploring the spatial compositions on the walls. Together, the paintings and installation function as an invitation for visitors to fully engage in a gesture of inclusivity, presence and immersive participation. Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia) lives and works in New York. In 2017 her work was the subject of a site-specific instal- lation at the Wright Restaurant, commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Beetle in the Leaves,” MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2016); “ Plastic Memory,” Simon Lee, London (2016); “ Tutsi Bas- kets,” Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2016); “Everywhere the Line is Looser,” Casey Kaplan, New York (2015); “Interiores,” Travesia Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico (2014) and “Motifs,” Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium (2014). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2014); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, 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 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Installation view, Sarah Crowner, Weeds. Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo by Jason Wyche. NEW YORK Sarah Crowner CASEY KAPLAN 121 West 27th Street February 26 - April 21 Sarah Crowner’s acrylic-on-canvas paintings have been put through the wringer. Her abstract imagery, made up of multi- colored semicircles, is cut up, stretched, restretched, and sewn together. Visitors can step up and down on low wooden platforms to “enter” the paintings, turning the experience into a performative event. These stages are pieces of a puzzle, as they formally mimic the rounded contours in her paintings. Sometimes her brushwork is visible, while other times it is totally flat, hiding aspects of the artist’s decision-making process. Her works’ seams quietly reveal that certain passages are made up of more than one section of canvas, which complicates their formal purity. In Opening Blues, 2018, for instance, the sewn shapes on the top half of the piece seem to interact with one another harmoniously, while the bottom half feels more cacophonous. The work is horizontally bisect- ed, and its two regions—despite being composed of similar pinks, blues, and raw-canvas umbers—function as distinct entities. This show, “Weeds,” is, like the titular plant, a stubborn thing. Though the modernist formalism the artist explores is “pleasant” in the most obvious of ways, it is also deceptive. The great deal of work that goes into the construction of her images—with Frankenstinian suturing—upsets any easy read. Her brilliant palette and elegant compositions conceal a weirder kind of thinking: one where the geometric and airy cleanliness of an Ellsworth Kelly or a Lorser Feitelson doesn’t die but gets sliced up, rearranged, and made into something oddly corporeal. — Valentina Sarmiento Cruz Installation view, Sarah Crowner, Weeds. Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo by Jason Wyche. What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week March 15, 2018 By Roberta Smith Painters often find their styles by setting narrow limits on their work. But things usually get really interesting when they start working against their own rules. Sarah Crowner, known over the last decade for stitching together cutout shapes of plain or painted canvas to form rectilinear abstract paintings, is sticking to first principles.Yet she’s messing with them so vigorously that “Weeds,” her fifth solo gallery show in New York, has the feeling of a breakthrough. Ms. Crowner has complicated her compositions, strewing them with tipsy curves, ellipses and parts of circles suggestive of orange sections. Her arrangements borrow from the history of abstraction without accruing too great a debt. Matisse’s cutouts and Ellsworth Kelly’s signature curves, which were often kissing, or stacked like those in the letter B, are repeatedly folded into the flux. Color is no longer necessarily solid and flat. Some shapes are brushy; others fade a bit, as if catching light from somewhere.There are even tiny glimpses of white canvas, like the bit of possible moon glow in “Opening Blues.” Elsewhere, variations of a single solid color are juxtaposed: close but different tones of, say, yellow (“Sliced Bouquet”) or pink (“Rotated Pink,” whose other main color is a dark green that slides toward textured chartreuse). The unruly blacks and grays of “Folded Greens” result from a combination of vis- ible brushwork, uneven staining and shifts in tone. And throughout, what appear to be shades of black turn out to be the darkest blues. Ms. Crowner’s sewn-canvas technique continues to give her colors a satisfying separateness. But now she is increasing contrasts and pushing toward a greater, also satisfying sense of difference and interaction. The works’ new subtle busyness becomes them. Once again, she has also altered the gallery’s floor with a series of six-and-a-half-inch-high platforms, both small and large, in plywood with a pine veneer. They bring the paintings’ curves into real space. Neither your feet nor your eyes can take anything for granted. Sarah Crowner. “Sliced Greens,” 2018. Photo: Image courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan; New York February 20, 2018 The FLAG Art Foundation is kicking off its ten-year anniversary this year with a show on minimalist great, Ellsworth Kelly.