portray and overall performance artwork percentage a curious – if now not always without delay apparent – kinship. Pollock gave rise to the time period ‘action painting’ (by way of critic Harold Rosenberg), Rauschenberg toured with and produced sets for choreographer Merce Cunningham’s dance agency, even as Klein used nude woman models as his paintbrush. Cue artist Sarah Crowner, the New York-primarily based painter who, too, has seamlessly sewn collectively both in a new series of stitched canvases for her first solo exhibition in Asia, on view at Simon Lee Gallery in Hong Kong. Crowner’s vivid artwork tempt impulsive comparisons with Matisse and Ellsworth Kelly, however it’s the backs of her canvases that display she’s telling an altogether unique story to them. The artist works immediately at the floor of her Brooklyn studio, composing painted swatches of canvas and intuitively fastening them collectively with an commercial Juki sewing device earlier than stretching them onto a body – ‘that’s the whilst the portray receives to the factor where I can recognize what it is.’ Crowner will stretch a painting ‘six or seven times’, altering its additives till it’s deemed ‘a success’.
‘Paintings for the Stage’ continues the artist’s architectural and scenographic interventions, these days explored inside the American Ballet Theatre Company’s Garden Blue production. ‘The revel in of operating on that scale, and working with performers, dancers, musicians and choreographer turned into life-changing for me. It made me begin thinking about my painting practice in a new manner,’ explains Crowner, who designed costumes as well as a sizable backdrop for Jessica Lang’s ballet. ‘I idea what if I ought to take that [theatre] revel in and come what may translate or at least deliver one of these factors into the gallery and notice what it does,’ says the artist. ‘For instance, what would it not be want to hold a portray on backdrop and how it’d affect your analyzing of a portray?’ To wit, Crowner enlisted nearby scenic painter and theatre set designer Pink Lam to realise a wall portray for her Hong Kong exhibition, casting her biggest canvas adrift in an aqueous azure mural. Her cutting-edge frame of work feels bolder, energised through her recent foray within the theatre. ‘I started setting distinctive colorations collectively that I generally wouldn’t… There’s a vibration and dimensionality that happens while you location these certain colorations collectively and I turned into interested in playing up the ones studies to the attention,’ she adds. ‘I’m interested by pushing that optical revel in increasingly.’ Encore! §
