Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers @ Luhring Augustine Gallery, NYC - Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, Philip Taaffe

Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers

Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Luhring Augustine presents a group exhibition that highlights the work of Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, and Philip Taaffe. These six artists share a kindred interest in disrupting of familiar forms, employing unique strategies such as manipulations of lines and planes – folding, pinching, slicing, splicing – and radical shifts in scale to reshape and reimagine recognizable and quotidian motifs. 

ARTISTS BIOS

Lygia Clark (b. 1920, Belo Horizonte, Brazil – d.1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, whose pioneering body of work reimagined the relationship between audience and the art object. A founding member of the 1950s Brazilian Neoconcretist movement, Clark proposed a radical approach to thinking about painting by treating its pictorial surface as if it were a three-dimensional architectural space. Her iconic Bichos, or sculptures constructed out of hinged metal planes, allowed for the audience to exercise authorship through participation. Clark’s reliance on the viewer to steer her sculptures through many possible configurations not only jeopardized the autonomy of the art object itself, but also reconfigured her art as a performative, time-based event.

Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) explores the spaces where geometry abuts gesture, materiality merges with composition, and the graphic confronts the handmade. Her sewn canvases initially appear pristine in their composition, however closer inspection reveals the various slippages, imprints, and nuances of hand-painted surfaces constructed from separate yet related elements. Architecture plays a significant role in many of her works; her site-specific wall pieces transform spaces into three-dimensional experiences in which the viewer processes the environment as one autonomous artwork. The patterns in her work, drawn equally from the natural world and historic sources, create an entryway between the art object and the context, enabling the viewer to be enveloped and literally step inside her work.

Mark Handforth’s (b. 1969, Hong Kong) works are interventions in space: offering novel engagements within existing environments and asserting new perspectives on familiar fixtures. His sculptures displace quotidian objects and recontextualize their forms in unexpected articulations. In some of his iconic works, the bodies of stars, streetlamps, and traffic signs whimsically buckle, twist, and droop. The seemingly defunct and defeated contortions in these forms are countered by a gracefulness imparted by Handforth’s meticulous craftmanship; this incongruity imbues the works with a wry humor and an endearing pathos. His works reference a post-punk aesthetic and utilitarian minimalism, while the capricious scale and juxtapositions draw on the legacies of Surrealism and Dadaist absurdism.

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago, IL – d. 2007, Granville, NY) was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. Her drive and determination produced a singularly innovative body of work characterized by a Cubist-informed Minimalism and streetwise Surrealism. Throughout her career, she reveled in the physicality of paint and approached her work through the constructive vocabulary of sculpture, warping, twisting, splintering, and knotting her canvases. In the 1980s Murray introduced three-dimensionality to her canvases, bringing about a complete break from traditional, flat, rectilinear compositions. Muddied, moody, and gestural, these paintings blazed a course of international recognition and notoriety.

Richard Rezac’s (b. 1952, Lincoln, NE) abstract sculptures, rooted in a studious consideration of the history of art, architecture, and design, quietly connote everyday sources, leaving the viewer with a sense of familiarity and closeness. Exceptionally precise in their execution, with each decision carefully considered by the artist, the pieces are made to be looked at and thought of with absorption. Their human scale and careful placement (the height on the wall, the distance they hang from the ceiling, etc.) initiates a dialogue that demands time, the works revealing themselves slowly. This combination of exquisite craft and spatial intentionality imparts a knowing presence to the sculptures, lending an ostensible sense that they are full of concealed information. Taciturn, earnest, and magnetic, they toggle between congruence and dissonance, space and form, lightness and solidity.

Philip Taaffe’s (b. 1955, Elizabeth, NJ) practice is distinguished by its elaborate sampling of techniques and symbols that merge iconography, design, and art historical and cultural motifs to generate something authentically new. Celebrated for his ability to build intricate and contemplative compositions culled from this wide-ranging lexicon of imagery, Taaffe produces transfixing works rife with geometric forms and interwoven complex patterns that call into question traditionally accepted definitions of realism and abstraction. The visual vibrancy and dynamism that underlie his work reveals the convergence of the optical and the conceptual, the decorative and the narrative, the natural and the man-made, as well as the ancient and the modern. 

LUHRING AUGUSTINE CHELSEA

531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.luhringaugustine.com

Sarah Crowner @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris "Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze" Exhibition

Sarah Crowner 

Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze 

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris 

26 April – 21 June 2025

SARAH CROWNER

Black and Blues and Oranges, both 2024 (details) 

© Sarah Crowner

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, presents Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze, a solo exhibition by SARAH CROWNER, uniting a new series of embroideries, bronze sculptures and canvases. This is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, and her first presentation in Paris.

Sarah Crowner is renowned for her investigations into colour, materiality and form. Her works, which span painting, sculpture, collage, tile installations and set design, invite a close engagement with the viewer. Subverting expectations of structure, texture and palette, they elicit new ways of slow and deliberate looking. For this exhibition, Sarah Crowner foregrounds abstract colour fields and juxtaposes hard and soft, reflective and absorbent, surfaces.

Five wool embroidered works from 2024 mark a new development in the artist’s practice. At first glance, they appear to be monochromatic canvases, each composed from a vibrating expanse of colour. Contemplated up close, however, they reveal themselves to be handmade objects, created stitch-by-stitch in snaking tendrils, from a varied range of hues. This subtle yet integral plurality is reflected in the titles of the works: Reds, Oranges, Blacks and Blues, Violets, and Whites. Under the changing, dappled light, one almost perceives the individual threads of wool as impasto brushstrokes, which take partial inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, 1889, as well as his paintings made in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The textured palette and swirling intensity of his canvases can be traced in the eddying surfaces of Crowner’s embroideries.

Collaboration plays a central role in Crowner’s practice. For the new ‘Tableaux en Laine’, she worked closely with a group of more than twenty embroiderers, based in Maine, USA. Ranging from school age to septuagenarians, they worked together to meticulously stitch each composition by hand over many days, based on ‘stitch map’ drawings created by the artist. These ‘maps’ are used as directional guides to translate colour and line into physical objects and ground the works within a formal painterly language. ‘It always goes back to painting’, the artist states.

While making her recent embroideries, Sarah Crowner was looking closely at the work of Richard Serra, from his early steel slabs to his black, monochrome drawings. Ostensibly simple, the drawings reveal what Sarah Crowner describes as ‘this heavy working, made gesture by gesture’ from thick oil sticks. Similarly, despite first appearances, his weighty and dense sculptures are speckled with patina, embedding within them a sense of passing time. Whether cast, stitched or sewn, this inherent slipperiness between expectation, perception and reality lies at the heart of Crowner’s practice.

In response to the wool paintings, Crowner’s ‘Pierres en Bronze’ sculptures are displayed almost as if they are onlookers, their highly polished surfaces reflecting spills and splashes of colour from the lush wool works. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, the bronze surfaces activate, generating new abstractions which are constantly in flux. Hard, heavy and solid, the sculptures are simultaneously ephemeral, as light, time and transience permeate their shifting surfaces. These Stone sculptures, as their titles insinuate, are based on small stones that Sarah Crowner has collected over the years from Rincon Beach in California, near where she grew up. With their natural holes and pockmarks, the stones resemble small Modernist sculptures, transformed here from their once matte and lightweight forms into enlarged and shiny bronzes.

In her sewn canvases, exhibited in the gallery space in Paris, Sarah Crowner melds order and spontaneity. Working according to a process she describes as ‘slow, fast, slow, fast, instinctual versus methodical’, she draws inspiration from elements of nature as much as art history. In Skyline (Blues) and Seafloor (Greens), both 2025, the shapes echo one another, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of déjà vu. First, the paintings appear as familiar fields of drawn lines, forms and colours; it is only from up close that one sees their inherent structure: cut fragments carefully sutured to form a greater whole.

Emphasising the act of transformation in her work, Crowner’s hard sculptures, soft textured embroideries, and cut and sewn canvases each encapsulate something of their opposite, encouraging the viewer to contemplate the yin-yang dualities of the everyday.

SARAH CROWNER (b. 1974, Philadelphia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions including SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2025); The Chinati Foundation, Marfa (2022–2024); Hill Art Foundation, New York; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (both 2023–2024); Auroras and Casa de Vidro, Instituto Bardi, São Paulo (2023); Museo Amparo, Puebla (2022–2023); KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville (2018–2019); and MASS MoCA, North Adams (2016–2017). Sarah Crowner’s works are in the collections of major international institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; The Contemporary Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER, PARIS

46 rue du Temple, 75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

Sarah Crowner @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, NYC

Sarah Crowner

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

Through January 16, 2021

Casey Kaplan presents an exhibition of recent work by SARAH CROWNER. The show, Sarah Crowner’s third with the gallery, debuts a new series of large-scale paintings.

The paintings in the exhibition demonstrate Sarah Crowner’s continually innovative approach to the medium and affinity for formal play. Each composition is made using the unique methodology that has come to define her practice, whereby individual sections of canvas are cut from patterns, painted, and sewn back together. Often forms are recycled or repurposed in a collage-like process; patterns emerge from the negative shapes of older paintings, or an entire composition might be spliced and reimagined on the studio floor. In these new works, the artist expands her visual language through acute variations in scale and color, with an emphasis on secondary colors such as, bright violets, searing oranges and dense grassy green, creating an exuberant, polychromatic environment. Most of the canvases are two-toned, engaging a spatial play between foreground and background through only two contrasting hues, or using raw canvas. The application of acrylic paint in each composition varies from densely saturated swatches of canvas that appear dyed, to loose and familiar expressionist brushwork, to even lighter washes of color that recall the soak-stain technique of Helen Frankenthaler. Proficiently executed, with a keen focus on texture and surface, the artworks reveal the unlimited potential of a singular color.

Cohesively, the paintings in the exhibition do not follow a shared pattern, but rather each adhere to their own internal logic. Some compositions resemble the calculated, geometric repetition of hard-edge painting, design, or woodblock printing. Others are more biomorphic and bear incidental, studio-accrued markings, engaging histories of abstract expressionism, color field and process-based painting. These differing formal and referential qualities lend each painting a distinct character, as if actively asserting their individuality, fluctuating from buoyant, first light elation to elusive, nocturnal guile; the prudent rational of Apollo to the frenetic passions of Dionysus. Many maintain a feeling of transient motion, for instance the undulating tendrils of raw canvas in “Medusa” (2020) that appear to slither across the canvas, like the mythological snakes cited in the painting’s title. A similar gesticulation and dramaturgy is found in two, large-scale, horizontal panels: “Orange and Others” and “Night Painting with Verticals” (both 2020) that, installed together, create a panoramic effect. The individual compositions unfold bidirectionally, legible from stage left or stage right. Symmetry is suggested, but withheld as shapes are reproduced, spliced, contorted and cut off in their turbulent tumble across the canvas.

This atmosphere of movement assimilates Sarah Crowner’s own physical and performative practice, whereby she shifts between the studio floor and the wall, deconstructing and rearranging canvas segments and allowing her compositions to settle intuitively within the picture plane. Through this process, each shape - repeated or unique - functions as an abstract building block that can be used to create new narratives. Culling inspiration from art history and the organic world, the works in the exhibition maintain a kinetic and fertile quality, rife with the lush hues of nature. With a masterful handling of surface, color and form, Sarah Crowner continues to challenge the constraints of material and embrace the endless possibilities of abstraction.

SARAH CROWNER (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York. Forthcoming exhibitions and projects include The Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, Fall 2021 and a large-scale commission for the US Embassy of Honduras in 2022. Recent projects include participation in the 57th edition of the Carnegie International (2018); scenography and costume design for Jessica Lang’s “Garden Blue” with the American Ballet Theater (2018); as well as the permanent site-specific installation at the Wright Restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum (2017.) In 2013 Sarah Crowner participated in a major survey exhibition on abstract painting at the Walker Art Center in MN and was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari. Her work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA amongst others.

CASEY KAPLAN

121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

caseykaplangallery.com

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