curated by Scott Hug, Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco, CA
Kamp K48 – The Zine Unbound
Posted by anncraven on 21 June 2005
Posted by anncraven on 21 June 2005
curated by Scott Hug, Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, San Francisco, CA
Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen, Denmark
Weekend Arts, The Boston Globe, front page, p. D17, May 13, 2005
Mirror Images
by Cate McQuaid
Weekend, Arts & Performance
May 13, 2005
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Gruner, Inc., New York, NY
The New York Horticulture Society, NY
Dallas Arts Revue, April 2005
Kali and Macaroons
by Michael Helsem
April 2005
curated by Micaela Giovannotti, Biblos Center for the Arts, Verona, Italy
Artnet.com, 2005
HORTICULTURE SOCIETY, New York
March 9 – May 25, 2005
Ann Craven, known for her bird imagery and use of repetition, created a new series of floral paintings for this exhibition, A Poppy is a Poppy is a Poppy. The show included paintings – often duplicated several times over – of poppies, water lilies and even birds. Craven’s images border on the saccharine but are more compelling for the questions they pose: Is it possible to impeccably create the same painting twice, even three times, maybe more; and does that repetition change the value or intensity of the image? As a result, Craven’s paintings can be seen as specimens of a process, often more interesting for their means of production than for their subject matter.
Modern Painters, p. 44, March 2005
You Must Remember This: Ann Craven’s Mnemonic Devices
by Barbara Pollack
Emerging Artists
March 2005
Pg. 44-45
curated by Lisa Kirk, FlatOtel, New York, NY
curated by Joseph R. Wolin, Perugi Arte Contemporanea, Padova, Italy
The New Museum, New York, NY; Consolidated Works, Seattle, WA; Arthouse, Austin, TX; Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA.
curated by Lisa Kirk, Scope Art Fair, Miami, FL
K48 is an Animal, Vol. 5, p. 87, 2004
curated by Simon Watson/Scenic, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Domestic, Los Angeles, CA
Fragile Prato
by Laura Mari
October 16, 2004
Galleria Paolo Curti / Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co., Milan, Italy
Mensile Di Arte, Arte, Cultura, Informazione, Vol. 374, p. 140-142, October 2004
Natura e Ironia
by Enzo Fabiani
October 2004
Pg. 94
Le Favole Nere di Ann Craven
by Licia Spagnesi
No. 374, October 2004
Pg. 140-142
PAOLO CURTI / ANNAMARIA GAMBUZZI & Co, Milan
September 22 – October 30, 2004
On Sept 22, 2004 at 18.30, Galleria Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co. presents the first Italian exhibition of the American artist Ann Craven.
Ann Craven lives and works in New York city. She received her MFA at Columbia University, School of the Arts in New York in 1994.
Ann Craven’s paintings are a sweet colour-coated narcotic trip – Craven seduces with pinks, yellows and scarlets that lure you into a fantastical Disney-like world where any trace of the original and harsh world of nature is abysmally lost. She portrays a nature that is naïve, a nature that has been manipulated, manipulated through commercial imagery in postcards, calendars and the film industry.
As in the 1973 sci-fi film “Soylent Green” (a direct reference for Craven’s work), the director Edward G. Robinson portrays Charlton Heston in a future New York struck by famine and set in a desolate landscape devoid of nature. The government encourages euthanasia which it awards with an elaborate right with a film (within a film) showing nature as it once was. Each individual is pacified by huge billboard size flashes of nature – frolicking deer, squirrels, greenery and colour – a right of passage into the next life beaming with promise of an abundant past.
With a Warholian sensibility of reproduction, Craven’s icons come from the natural world. The reproductions that one finds in cable nature channels, nature books and magazines (the American media based portrayal of nature) are Craven’s source for seriality that both mystifies and parallels this systematic approach to painting. Ann Cravens media produced images are a crystal-ball-like truth looking at world becoming more and more like “Soylent Green”.
Is it an apprehension of inevitable loss that induces Ann Craven’s luscious and luring painterly brush stroke, and the desire to multiply her own works by creating copies of her paintings, re-enacting with exactness the articulation of each previous individual gesture? Or it is perhaps an ironic jab at the assumptions of change and progress in Western Capitalism.
This is Ann Craven’s first solo exhibition in Italy.
AD, Architectural Digest, p. 94, Italy, 2004
The New York Times, Friday July 9, 2004
feature article, Tema Celeste, vol. 104, p. 38-45, July – August 2004
Critics Picks, Artforum.com, July 2004
Time Out New York, no. 457, p. 55, July 1-8, 2004
The Neo Baroque Era
by Joyce B. Korotkin
No. 104
July/August 2004
Flavor Pill, June 29, 2004
curated by Augusto Arbizo, Artemis Greenberg Van Doren, New York, NY
Feature article, The Nature Issue, p. 96-97, June 2004
Art New England, p. 26, June-July 2004
June 2004
Meredith Fife Day
June 2004
Mary Haus
Tema Celeste, May 2004
Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, NY
The Village Voice, May 5-11, 2004
organized by Simon Watson / Scenic, Marc Selwyn Fine Art at Domestic, Los Angeles, CA
feature article, In The World, p. 142-147, vol. 5, Italy, May 2004
Issue No. 5, Maggio 2004
Rachele Ferrario
May 2004
Bethany Anne Pappalardo
Esso Gallery, New York, NY
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc., New York, NY
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL
review, Time Out New York, April 8-18, 2004
Issue No. 445, 2004
Barbara Pollac
review, Artcritical.com, April 2004 artcritical.com
April 2004
Benjamin La Rocco
Kultur, March 27, 2004
review, Voice Picks, The Village Voice, March 24, 2004
Galerie St. Etienne, New York, NY
essay for exhibition at Mario Diacono, Boston, MA, 2004
KLEMENS GASSER & TANJA GRUNERT INC., New York
March 12 – April 17, 2004
Deer in the daisies. Birds in the branches. How could such a show be making a radical statement?
Craven is able to recreate the sappiness that draws people to these tchotchkes while at the same time underscoring the fallibility of commercial reproduction. She makes it impossible for viewers to find the original among her reproductions or, by extension, to know why they should value one style of painting over another.
—Barbara Pollock, Artnews
Ann Craven’s images are not taken from nature, but from reproductions of nature, and the mourning inherent therein. Craven’s appeal not only as sweet, but as lurid; they portray beings as flowery, and absurd,
and deeply sympathetic as corpses in caskets. The fact that Craven’s second solo show at Gasser & Grunert is a revisitation upon precisely the same imagery as that of her first show, represents another contextual politicizing of what Art in America’s Anastasia Aukeman called “this weird Craven-Disney world.” Social and personal success in Western capitalism is measured by the perpetual forward march, and Craven’s thematic resolve is a direct assault on assumptions of change and progress. Her focus on themes harkens to periods in art and painting when the school of an artist would continue making work long after that artist’s death, and, in so doing, the artist’s creative influence could maintain and grow in a manner which allowed it to keep up with the day’s ruling families—the then equivalent of present-day conglomerates. Our own cultural obsession with the individual heroism of artist, and their ongoing “breakthroughs,” leaves artists ill-equipped to compete in the higher echelons of the world economy; there is no building on invention, and there is no future for invention. As summarized by Aukeman, “by turns see, ironic and seductive, the works take their place in a Warholian tradition of subversiveness.”
Her nostalgia has to do with the place of nature, and perhaps even of nineteenth-century nature painting, in a world that is becoming more and more like that of Soylent Green. Her heartfelt canvases,
touched by an almost religious reverence for the planet’s flora and fauna, are themselves products of an artificial, digitally enhanced reality.
—Francine Koslow Miller, Artforum
Craven’s relationship to Warhol is not just based in her use of repetition, but in her sourcing of media images specifically associated with death. Warhol’s electric chair, or Marilyn, or crashed Dean Convertible–all relate to Craven’s “Dear”, which is not culled from Bambi, but from the scoff thriller, Soylent Green. Charlton Heston, in a future New York, discovers that the world’s food source is people; the “Dear” image, appearing in a film in the film, is employed to pacify the dying on their way to the dinner plate. Craven, by her friezes, underscores media repetition, and makes a similar assertion: we are nourished by our own deaths.
As in Director Ridley Scott’s android-filled Los Angeles, in which it became impossible to distinguish sentient being from cyborg, viewers are hard-pressed to discern Craven’s sincerity amid her tacky arts-and-crafts color combinations and hokey subject matter. Consider the triptych Hello Hello Hello, three canvases featuring the same bird. Only the slightest differences exist among the pictures, yet these
compositional discrepancies originate in the artist’s gestural brush strokes. Rather than emulating a machine, like so many painters before her, Craven emulates the expressive, sentimental human touch—
much like a bird might mimic language.
—Tim Griffin, Time Out
review, M Magazine, March 2004
review, N.O.A.R. The New Orleans Art Review, p. 26-29, March/April, 2004
March 2004
Joyce Korotkin
curated by Denise Markonish, catalogue essay by Michael Crewdson
ArtSpace, New Haven, CT
Mario Diacono, Boston, MA
ART REVIEW, New York Times, February 15, 2004
review, The Boston Globe, P. D20, Friday, January 30, 2004
curated by David Rubin, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA
MARIO DIACONO at ARS LIBRI, Boston
January 9 – February 4, 2004
Painting as re-Production
A future is the uncovering of events scripted in buried memories. This may be precisely what is occurring to contemporary painting, at least in the case of an artist like Ann Craven. Except that, for an artist today, memory consists less in what is remembered from an “examined life” than what one encounters in photographic reproductions, either of art, or of nature, or of people or gods. We now recognize reality and history as having authenticity, for the purpose of art making, if certified by photography, since their identical reappearance in different places and time parallels the way in which society lives the basic modes of production and consumption of goods. Even if Ann Craven does not inject in her work a program of pointedly critiquing, or ironically mimicking, this interaction that mass-produced objects and media-produced images have with social consciousness, her method of a different repetition or repeatability of an icon – birds and deers, for instance- certainly inscribes an ideology of lyrical visitation of essential processes of re-production. The fact that she juxtaposes, as in the two pictures exhibited here, a photography-derived image (the Eastern Bluebird in the foreground) to one drawn from nature (the hollyhocks in the middle ground), and a representational field (the bird/plant pattern) to an abstract one (the non-naturalistic, though portraiture-inferring, pink or black background), conveys that she is indeed forever complicating a systemic approach to images with an intuitive elaboration of the mode of painting. On the other hand, the insistent reworking of a single icon has been, from the Byzantine Madonnas to the Qur’anic inscriptions, and from Warhol’s Jackie’s, Marilyns, Maos, and self-portraits to Halley’s cell-and-conduit sociograms, an art-historical model to which Ann Craven has suddenly impressed a new twist. The difference consists in that her iconic repetitions are based not on metaphysics, photography, or design, but on a painterly brushwork-as if she were defying a taboo that identified painterliness with representational or abstractional uniqueness and considered the expressivist distinctions of the brush marks incompatible not just with seriality, but also with the intensive (re)production of an identical yet constantly re-experienced act.
The replicant method is further carried by Ann Craven from the repeated image to the picture’s enactment, for this appears to retrace, in its still unique articulation, the entire history of post-World War II painting: the actionist gesture of Abstract Expressionism (for the forceful gesture brought to each individual brushstroke in the modeling of the birds); Pop Art’s reliance on the typology of mass produced images for its subject matter (with the lifting of her imagery from ornithological books); the fixed spatial relations of Minimalism (for the iteration of an identical gestalt in a number of canvasses); Conceptualism’s primacy of mind over matter (for the central role that Ideas play in the unfolding of her body of work); the emphasis brought by Neo-expressionism on the inscription of constructed images with historical resonances (for her descent into the Birdworld as amounting to the imprinting of an archetype); Gerhard Richter’s photo-based, frozen and blurred Romanticism (for the moody alternation of misting and sharp focusing in the figuration of the plants in the middle ground of the canvas). As if unfolding and modeling a drama from a cartoon, Ann Craven discovers a further avenue to life and meaning in everyday themes that we may have glanced at as lifeless and meaningless.
In Bosch’s circa 1470- 90 triptych known as the Garden of Earthly Delights, now in the Prado, birds were present, in both a realistic and a fantastic form, at the creation of Adam and Eve, and are therefore, when in a pristin condition as in Ann Craven’s pictures (where they are lifted from naturalistic handbooks), an essential emblem of Earthly Paradise. Being apparently untouched by evolution and acculturation, having the same colorful and delightful selves now as they had the emergence of homo sapiens some 50,000 years ago, they are at least as new and immaculately concepted as Koons’ vacuum cleaners enshrined in Plexiglass boxes. In a word, Craven’s birds were also present at the creation of Painting, for they are entirely about an image’s need to become archetypal, and a picture’s desire to be an act of objective existence, a model of magical resistance to the obsolescence of the object. Both This way No This way (Aut Aut) (2003, oil on linen, 84 x 120 inches),and Nevermore(2003, oil on linen, 90 x 72 inches), the two works shown here, repeat differently an earlier icon from 2002, Hit Song Bird. Usually, Craven’s pieces enact the difference in repetition by changing the canvas’ scale or the color of the flat background. But also the number, shape, density of the brushstrokes change from one replication to another, as well as the tonalities of both the fore-and background, if the picture’s colors and scale remain the same. In Hit Song Bird, the ground was of a light blue and the dimensions 72 x 48 inches, while in This way it is an intense pink and in Nevermore is black. The bird appearing in all three pictures is an Eastern Bluebird- its long bill open; the head, closed wings, and tail’s feathers of a marine blue; the large eyes, in the middle of a gray area, highlighted by a make-up of white dots; the throat of a bright red, changing to orange in the breast and to ashes and sometimes purple in the abdomen; the black feet clutching a leafless, broken brown branch. Behind the bird, three spikes of a hollyhock fade into the background, always in the same pattern, their moody red flowers withering wide open but the top buds suddenly coming into sharp focus, probably for no other reason, beside internalizing Richter’s alienated Romanticism, than to emphasize the cycle of life and death in nature. This way, however, repeats for the first time the Eastern bluebird twice eon the same canvas, one a symmetrically reverse image of the other, like in a Rorschach test, the two branches meeting at the bottom of the canvas to perform a perfect V. While the hollyhocks joined at center create a continuum backdrop, the two birds staring in opposite directions keep in perfect tension their almost alchemical unity of the contraries, and translate their “either/or” visual trope in an inscrutable iconography.
– Mario Diacono, January 2004
New York, NY — http://www.theoutlawseries.com
curated by Lisa Kirk, 110 W 14th Street, New York, NY
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, and Allston Skirt Gallery, Miami Beach, FL
F NEWS, November 2003 moniquemeloche.com
p. 538, Vogue, September 2003
September 2003
Elisabeth Franck
New York Magazine, July 28, 2003
Time Out New York, July 24-31, 2003
curated by Yvonne Force and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Salon 94, New York, NY
ADAA On Line, 2003 artdealers.org
The New York Times, July 18, 2003
Art and Letters Section, New York Sun, Thursday July 17, 2003
The New York Sun, p. 15, July 3, 2003 artcritical.com
The Art Newspaper, No. 138, July-August 2003
curated by David Hunt, Space 101, Brooklyn, NY
Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL
review, New York Press, Volume 17, Issue 45, 2003
Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston, MA
Allston Skirt Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Art in America, March 2003
March 2003
Anastasia Aukerman
curated by Edward Thorp, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc., and Flash Art, Art Basel, Miami Beach, FL
ArtNews, November 2002
Tema Celeste, November 2002
NY Arts Magazine, vol. 7, no. 11, November 2002 nyartsmagazine.com
Artforum, November 2002
Frieze, November/December 2002 frieze.com
November 2002
Francine Koslow Miller
November 2002
Barbara Pollack
November 2002
Joyce Korotkin
curated by Sean Horton, The Model Gallery, Boston MA
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc., New York, NY
Time Out New York, September 26 – October 6, 2002
Issue No. 365, 2002
Tim Griffin
artnet.com, September 23, 2002 artnet.com
The New Yorker, p. 21, September 23, 2002
September 2002
Unidentified
The Boston Globe, Weekend Section, p. C18, September 20, 2002
The New York Times, Friday September 20, 2002 nytimes.com
September 2002
Cate McQuaid
September 2002
Grace Glueck
South End News, vol.23, no.35, p. 19, September 19, 2002
Critic’s Picks, Artforum.com, September 17, 2002 artforum.com
Writers Picks, NY Arts Magazine, vol. 7, no. 9, September 2002
The Boston Globe, Friday, September 13, 2002
September 2002
Cate McQuaid
NY ARTS, September 2002
Bloggy, September 5, 2002 bloggy.com
September 2002
Brian Boucher
KLEMENS GASSER & TANJA GRUNERT INC., New York
September 4 – October 5, 2002
September 2002
John Reed
September 2002
C. Sean Horton
Triple Candie, New York, NY
curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL
artnet.com, May 20, 2002 artnet.com
Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston, MA
Wallstreet Weekend Journal, February 8, 2002
Issue No. 71, 2002
Michael Wilson
curated by Barbara Bloemink, Hammond Museum, North Salem, New York
artnet.com, April 23, 2001 artnet.com
artnet.com, January 12, 2001 artnet.com
curated by Annegreth Nill, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
The Lantern, Ohio State University, August 10, 2000
Feature Article, Nassau Weekly, vol. 21, no. 20, April 13, 2000
p. 37, Dart Magazine, vol. 2, no 9, Winter 1999
new acquisitions exhibition curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL
1999
Christopher Chambers
White Columns, New York
Curt Marcus Gallery, New York
to benefit The Coalition for the Homeless, Art Walk New York, NY
curated by Patrick Gallery & Livet Richard, Ga Ga Gallery, New York, NY
The New York Times, November 6, 1998
p.76, Time Out New York, November 5-12, 1998
Gallery Go Round, p. 126, Paper Magazine, November 1998
newyorkcitysearch.com, October 30, 1998
The New Yorker, October 26 – November 2, 1998
October 1998
Unidentified
Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, NY
Art Walk New York, NY
Gallery Ha Ha, Knoxville, TN
TN Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
Knoxville News Sentinel [Knoxville, TN], January 11, 1998
p. 22, Metro Pulse [Knoxville, TN], January 8, 1998
1998
Andrea Scott
curated by Michael Jenkins, Wooster Gardens, New York, NY
Guadalajara, Mexico.
Lauren Wittels Gallery, New York, NY
sponsored by David Geffen, New York Hospital, NY
Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, NY
curated by Milena Kanovska, Provincetown Art Museum, Provincetown, MA
White Columns, New York, NY
curated by Carin Kuony, The Swiss Institute, New York, NY
exhibition juried by Chuck Close, Charles Gwathmey, Nathan Oliveira, and Robert Ryman, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; work by newly elected members & recipients of honors and awards; awarded Rosenthal Foundation Young Painter Prize
Lauren Wittels Gallery, New York, NY
November 1995
Roberta Smith
October 1995
Unidentified
LAUREN WITTELS, New York
1995
Lauren Wittels Gallery, New York, NY