Sarah Crowner: Format

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.