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

Ray Materson @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - Embroideries, 1990–2023

Ray Materson: Embroideries, 1990–2023

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

February 4 – March 18, 2023

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents a solo exhibition for Ray Materson (b.1954), his first in New York since 1996. The exhibition features approximately thirty-five artworks that date from the nineties up until today.

Ray Materson makes elaborate miniature embroideries from the loose threads of disassembled garments, most typically socks. His art speaks eloquently and directly to the myriad ways in which sheer need—creative, personal, and economic—can foster uncanny ingenuity.

Incarcerated from 1987-1995 for crimes he committed while in the thrall of addiction, he began to embroider as part of his effort to express a personal style within the constraints of uniformity imposed by prison garb. His first piece was a logo for a sports team he followed, and he soon made other logos on commission for fellow inmates who wanted signs of affiliation—national flags, hearts and flowers—to send to loved ones. As he became more accomplished and found inspiration in a book on Impressionist art, Ray Materson had an epiphany: his work did not need to be mimicry, but could be more serious; he could create his own designs and tell his own stories.

In contrast to the degradations of prison life, the humanism of Ray Materson’s art is palpable. He comingles the real, the recovered, and the imagined in intricate pocket-sized parables of debasement and redemption. What we see from the outset is the persistence of memory, the unfolding of family history, and the characters from his childhood that were important to him, such as the professional athletes he followed. The dichotomy between hope and despair, a light and darkness, is like a psychological chiaroscuro, with heroes like Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson and Joe DiMaggio, and the reminiscences of The House on York Road to Once a Young Man and Dad in Central Park, circa 1940, versus the detention dramas of Morals Charge, Waiting for the Man and Almost Free… At Last. Some of his recent works have hard-hitting socio-political implications, like Theater of Abomination (2022), a scathing response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision.

A Materson exhibition of this scale would not have been possible without the generosity of The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation. Louis-Dreyfus (1932-2016), a businessman, philanthropist, and major collector of outsider and contemporary art, was a great patron of Ray Materson’s and amassed a significant collection of his work. Proceeds from the sales of pieces from the Foundation will benefit the Harlem Children’s Zone, which is dedicated to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty in New York City.

Ray Materson’s art is held in numerous prominent private collections as well the permanent holdings of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, and the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont. Previous solo exhibitions include those at American Primitive Gallery, New York (1994), University of California, Davis (2007), and the Mini-Time Machine Museum of Miniatures, Tucson, AZ (2015-16). In 2002, the artist published a memoir, Sins and Needles: A Story of Spiritual Mending (Algonquin Books, 2002).

Finally, the artist and gallery are indebted to Aarne Anton, whose early and steadfast championing of Ray Materson at his American Primitive Gallery, effectively brought his works to the attention of the art world and beyond.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

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