Sarah Crowner engages with architectural space and geometric abstraction in her tactile painting practice, which is defined by a strategic yet subtle approach to composition and material. Throughout her process, she takes inspiration from a range of sources—such as organic patterns found in nature and graphic forms derived from twentieth-century modernism—to explore shape, color, and texture. 

Stitched together from cut sections of canvas, Untitled is exemplary of Crowner’s sewn paintings. Using an industrial sewing machine, the artist binds together hand-painted and raw panels of cut and shaped canvas to create this striking geometric composition. The visible seams between sections make apparent the construction of the work while lending a tangibility to the lines and contradicting the flatness of the surface. The uneven washes of paint imbue each of the colorful shapes with depth. Crowner describes the laborious, physical process in which she deconstructs and rebuilds the materials as a way to understand painting and abstract form. With its intersecting planes of brilliant red and orange hues alongside the sections of neutral raw canvas precisely stitched together, the work references collage and tailoring as well as the dimensionality of sculpture to yield her singular painterly approach.

About the artist: Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) earned her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1996), studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and received her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York (2002). Crowner’s work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; and the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico. Her work is represented in major institutions such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Contemporary Austin, TX; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN. Crowner lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.