Curated by Julia Trotta (September 3–21)
Curated by Clemence White (September 24 – October 12)
Curated by Matthew Higgs (October 15 – November 9)

The New York Studio School is pleased to present Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory), September 3–November 9, 2025. Originally conceived and first exhibited at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where it was organized by co-director Anne Collins Goodyear in collaboration with the artist, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s paintings of the moon, created between 2020 and 2024.

Based on direct observation, each work documents the date, time, and place of its making, underscoring Craven’s interest in the relationship between the cyclical rhythms of nature and the personal experience of time and memory. Craven’s repeated renditions of the moon, captured as both an eternal presence and an ever-changing one, reflect her deep fascination with seriality, a hallmark of her practice, as she revisits and reinterprets motifs over time. The return of the work to New York from Maine mirrors the cyclical nature of the moon, and of life itself, both primary concerns of Craven’s work.

To highlight the experimental breadth of Craven’s practice, the exhibition features the artist’s “laboratory” of lunar studies, a collection stored and inventoried in carefully labeled cardboard containers. This presentation will offer visitors insight into the artist’s process, revealing how Craven’s canvases trace both a celestial trajectory and a personal one.

Unfolding in three rotations—as the exhibition did at Bowdoin—each installation reaffirms the resilience of Craven’s subject matter. The inaugural iteration will be curated by Julia Trotta, Independent Curator (September 3–21). Clemence White, Director at Karma, will curate the second rotation (September 24–October 12). The third and final installation (October 15–November 9) will be curated by Mathew Higgs, Director and Chief Curator at White Columns. Collectively, the exhibition will draw from 185 compositions, each executed from direct observation of nature. Just as the moon reveals itself in both rural and urban environments, adopting shifting nuances in these different contexts, so too Craven’s depictions of this glowing orb will render accessible new constellations of thought as filtered through the vision of each curatorial contributor.

The movement of Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) from Maine to New York echoes the artist’s own trajectory and underscores her deep commitment to both locales. This connection is accentuated by the exhibition’s formative relationship to Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020-2024), on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine through January 4, 2026, and Spotlight: Ann Craven, on view at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine through September 14, 2025. The New York Studio School’s presentation of Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) testifies to both the resilience and transformation implicit in the work of Ann Craven and affirms its enduring and essential qualities.

As above, so below—every vision of heaven is mirrored by a depiction of hell. Paintings of the Last Judgment throughout the millenia, from Jan van Eyck to Michelangelo to William Blake to Buddhist Mandalas, set the two realms in relation, representing moral consequences as a dichotomous, mutually enabling pair. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, the counterpart to the Italian poet’s Paradiso, artists like Sandro Botticelli and Gustave Doré have attempted to map hell’s nine circles, charting its strata from the Earth’s crust down into its core. Following A Particular Kind of Heaven, last year’s exhibition sited in Ann Craven’s deconsecrated church in Maine, Karma presents A Certain Form of Hell. Titled after a 1983 Ed Ruscha painting just like its predecessor, the exhibition features works exploring the netherworld in its many manifestations.

Warming, cleansing, life-giving—fire is also the archetypal symbol of hell. Milton Avery’s Charred Forest (1939) shows its ashy aftermath in the Canadian Gaspé Peninsula, where he spent a formative summer developing the luminous planes of color that would define his mature style. While Avery’s painting suggests both destruction and the promise of rebirth, Mungo Thomson’s Wildfire (June) (2021) shows the blaze still raging, its flames illuminated by an LED lightbox. The absence of light can also be hellish, as in the windows opening out onto a black void in Henni Alftan’s Darkness (2024) or the door to nowhere in Hughie Lee-Smith’s The End (The Pink Door) (1998). Cecily Brown’s Wee Hell (2025) also transcends fiery hues, instead taking cues from Old Master treatments of the underworld and translating them into a kaleidoscopic inferno of whirling brushstrokes.

Other artists draw our attention to the sinister underbellies of supposedly neutral objects and places, probing our cultural unconscious. Martin Wong’s Eye of Providence (1975) riffs on the design of the US dollar bill, highlighting the cleaved pyramid that some believe symbolizes malevolent secret societies—namely, the Illuminati. Mathew Cerletty’s photorealist, oil-on-linen Ribeye (2025) crops in on two glistening slabs of meat, industrially packaged and ready for consumption. Jane Dickson’s LV 82 Casino Girls Red Felt (2021), painted on a blood-red swath of the titular textile, depicts figures transfixed by the glow of slot machines, suspended in some self-inflicted purgatory. Leonora Carrington’s graphite drawings of Parisian street scenes find hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously quipped, in “other people.” Mike Kelly’s darkly humourous Length (1985) implies that the male psyche is an underworld all its own.

Hell can be abstract, as immaterial and wrenching as a feeling. Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch’s Rovereto VI 64.Malaktion (2012) is visceral, its ridges of scarlet paint manipulated with the artist’s fingers during one of his gory performances. Peter Bradley’s Nix Olympia (1973), its colors applied via spray gun, appears not bodily but mineral, like lava roiling out of the depths. The crimson ground of Richard Mayhew’s phosphorescent Untitled (Abstract Composition) (1975) is horizontally bisected by a blue current, the work reads as both landscape—perhaps the banks of the River Styx—and color field. Comprising nine perfect circles excised from silver cardboard, Cady Noland’s (Not Yet Titled) Parkett 46 (1996) conveys the violence of a stockade from geometry alone. While this form of torture is medieval, Noland’s evocation of the burning shame of public humiliation resonates in a contemporary culture intimately familiar with the spectacle of suffering. If, as Dante wrote, “the path to paradise begins in hell,” a consideration of the underworld is a necessary evil.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Adam Alessi, Henni Alftan, March Avery, Milton Avery, Bo Bartlett, Seth Becker, Brett Bigbee, Dike Blair, Casey Bolding, Louise Bourgeois, Katherine Bradford, Peter Bradley, Cecily Brown, Lucy Bull, Tom Burckhardt, Kathy Butterly, David Byrd, Jorge Camacho, Leonora Carrington, Sean Cavanaugh, Mathew Cerletty, Kye Christensen-Knowles, Andrew Cranston, Ann Craven, Alex Da Corte, Phoebe Derlee, Nancy Diamond, Jane Dickson, Lois Dodd, Matthew Tully Dugan, Betsy Eby, Nicole Eisenman, Melanie Essex, Hadi Falapishi, Ian Felice, Marley Freeman, Jeremy Frey, Sanaa Gateja, Wade Guyton, Kate Hargrave, Phoebe Helander, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Tatsuo Ikeda, Ulala Imai, Yvonne Jacquette, Tamo Jugeli, Alex Katz, Mike Kelley, Mia Kokkoni, Friedrich Kunath, Hughie Lee-Smith, Aubrey Levinthal, Jacob Littlejohn, Lee Lozano, Kathryn Lynch, Calvin Marcus, Keith Mayerson, Richard Mayhew, Sam McKinniss, Mark Milroy, Hermann Nitsch, Cady Noland, Nathaniel Oliver, Woody De Othello, Laura Owens, James Prosek, Luisa Rabbia, Ugo Rondinone, Sterling Ruby, Maja Ruznic, Borna Sammak, Arthur Simms, Marian Spore Bush, Emilie Stark-Menneg, Jay Stern, Rudolf Stingel, Tabboo!, Mungo Thomson, Tristan Unrau, Carole Vanderlinden, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Ouattara Watts, Nicole Wittenberg, Martin Wong, Jonas Wood, Randy Wray, Xiao Jiang, Norman Zammitt, Luigi Zuccheri.

Curated by Anne Collins Goodyear (May 22–June 30)
Curated by Jay Sanders (July 1–18)
Curated by Adam Weinberg (July 20–August 17)

Held concurrently with Painted Time (2020-2024) at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) focuses on Ann Craven’s moon paintings, executed from 2020 through 2024. Craven begins by painting the moon plein air and afterwards scales her composition based on her initial observation. Over the course of the exhibition, three curators will collaborate with the artist to execute three distinct presentations of her moon paintings. The exhibition, like the moon itself, will evolve over time, bearing the traces of the moon’s “celestial journey” within the universe of the gallery.

Taking place in three rotations, the inaugural installation of the exhibition will be curated by Anne Collins Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art (May 22–June 30); Jay Sanders, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Artists Space will curate the second rotation (July 1–18); and Adam Weinberg, Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art will curate the third and final rotation (July 20–August 17). Collectively, the exhibition will be selected from over 150 compositions, each one executed from nature, the full range of which will be made accessible through an accompanying digital catalogue. Approximately 20 paintings will appear on view in each rotation.

The exhibition is overseen and developed by Anne Collins Goodyear, Co-Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. It is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020-2024), on view May 3, 2025, through January 4, 2026 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, and Spotlight: Ann Craven, on view May 14 to September 14, 2025 at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine.

Additional features can be found in the Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) digital catalogue.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art gratefully acknowledges the Shapell Family Art Fund and the KHR McNeely Family Foundation, Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, for generous support of Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory).

Losing the Empty Feeling
“What is the literature of food?” asked my undergrad poetry professor, some twenty years ago.
“A Moveable Feast!” I blurted out.
“No… That’s a social history of a bunch of artists and writers. Try again.”
To which I should have replied: “Tomato tomato, Professor Hart. Tomato tomato.”
The idea being that then and now (and earlier than then, and probably until forever) ideas—visual, verbal, and otherwise—are forged around a table. And they require nouriture if anything is to be expected of them.
Still lifes: stuff of country house collections and art school exercises. Still lifes: fodder for the materialists out there, happy to denigrate them as simply representing the bourgeois accumulation of wealth. (Look at all those lobsters!)
And since vegetables have more patience than humans when it comes to braggarts and half-starts, the still life has become the arena of virtuosity (Weston’s peppers) or experimentation (Cezanne’s napkins that resemble Mont Sainte-Victoire).
All of the above rings true, but the true value of the still life rests in the middle, and how that connects to the people gathered around. The artists in this group show represent an ideal, impossible dinner party. Studiomates break bread with the long deceased. What emerges is the temporal magic of the genre. Want to keep your fish fresh? Paint a picture.
Our desire to hold on to fleeting life is the tablecloth on which every still life rests. It’s also the emotion core to the formation of artist communities, if not the formation of art itself.
In our time, many of us have Brooklyn. Earlier artists had other places where they worked and ate together.
In the opening chapter of A Moveable Feast, which IS about food, an aged Hemingway looks back on his younger self as he looks across a Parisian café table at a young woman.
I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink. I’ve seen you, beauty…
That would be enough for most of us, but his appetite remained.
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
The still life is the wine and the oysters, and it’s the person across the table, who might not even know it yet.
-Hunter Braithwaite, May 2025

This special installation highlights Ann Craven’s vibrant, emotive works that explore nature, memory, and repetition. Deeply connected to Maine, where she lives and works part of the year, Craven finds inspiration in its landscapes, skies, and ever-changing light. Her internationally celebrated work captures fleeting moments with bold color and expressive brushwork, offering a profound connection between observation, imagination, and the passage of time. Spotlight: Ann Craven is part of a statewide collaboration celebrating the artist’s impact and vision.

Often regarded as a colorist, this exhibition repositions Ann Craven (born 1961) within a deeper language that moves beyond her traditional motifs–moons, flowers, and birds–to explore the mechanics of painting itself. It will highlight an often overlooked conceptual framework, where seriality, repetition, and shifts in scale function as both meditative and formal devices in her paintings.

Craven’s works are a testament to the power of conceptual art and her connection to the recurring rhythms of nature, where seriality, color, and brushwork dominate her canvases from 2020 to the present. Audiences are invited to question the boundaries of painting and to engage with the ways in which Craven redefines traditional genres and styles as one of the leading painters of her generation.

The Farnsworth’s exhibition is the anchor to the celebration of the 2025 Maine in America Award, which honors Craven’s exceptional contributions to Maine’s arts and culture. This lifetime achievement award recognizes her enduring impact on the art world and her dedicated role in the cultural landscape of Maine. As part of this honor, works by Craven will be shown at additional institutions around the state, including companion presentations titled, Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) on view May 22 through August 17, 2025 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Spotlight: Ann Craven, on view May 14 to September 14, 2025, at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. The KHR McNeely Family Foundation will fund two underwriting scholarships for artists attending Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture this summer.

The Maine in America award will be given to Ann Craven at The Farnsworth Gala 2025 on July 18, 2025.

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce A Rose Is, an expansive group exhibition that examines the ubiquity and multivalent meaning of the rose throughout art history and visual culture. Across a wide array of media, including video, sculpture, painting, and text, the exhibition considers the rose in all of its symbolic and ritual complexity, ultimately seeking to complicate our familiarity with it as a vehicle for consumption and desire.

Artists include: Farah Al Qasimi, Polly Apfelbaum, Arakawa, Genesis Belanger, Louise Bourgeois, Joe Brainard, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Ann Craven, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Jay DeFeo, Ethyl Eichelberger, Awol Erizku, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tony Feher, Allison Janae Hamilton, Gabriella Hirst, Peter Hujar, John Jarboe, Anna Jermolaewa, Sarah Jones, Anselm Kiefer, Lee Krasner, Dr. Lakra, Linder, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Katie Paterson, Nicolas Party, Kay Rosen, James Rosenquist, Taryn Simon, Charles Sheeler, Kiki Smith, Haim Steinbach, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol

Drawing inspiration from Cy Twombly’s monumental, four-part painting The Rose III (2008), the exhibition situates the rose—both physically and figuratively—as an icon of beauty, enticement, excess, and abjection, all at the same time. Set against a vibrant turquoise backdrop, three purple, yellow, and tangerine roses overflow and drip down the face of the first three panels of the twenty-five-foot-long canvas, with the fourth panel containing text fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Roses (1926). Through an ecstatic combination of scale, color, and form, Twombly allows viewers to see the lushness and vitality of the roses while also contemplating their diminishment.

The literary and linguistic life of the rose is explored throughout the exhibition. From excerpted stanzas from Rilke’s poem to the language games found in Kay Rosen’s A Rose Is (1978/2025)—itself a reference to the line “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” from Gertrude Stein’s poem Sacred Emily (1913)—the rose is framed as an idea, just as much as a perishable object to be given or received. Rosen’s large scale, fuchsia text on FLAG’s opening wall, as well as the photo-text work from which it is derived, casts the rose as a word to explore the tenuous relationship between concepts and the objects they point to. Leaning into Stein’s sensibility that “I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do,” Rosen repeats the word rose again and again throughout her poem, such that new phonetic sounds are produced and with them new directions of meaning and imagery as well. Rather than imagine the rose solely as a flower, or in relation to the ideas of consumption and desire only, Rosen captures its complexity as so much of the work included in A Rose Is does: as a malleable and historically layered entity open to contradiction and revision.

Throughout the exhibition, viewers are invited to consider the flower as a site of overlapping and contradictory meanings. Though the combination of advertising and cultural ritual has made the rose synonymous with Valentine’s Day and romantic gestures more broadly, it has equally strong associations with funeral processions and end-of-life commemorations. James Lee Byars’s sculpture Rose Table of Perfect (1989) highlights this duality, as 3,333 freshly cut red roses are studded into a perfect red sphere, only to fade and eventually die over the course of the exhibition. Like the Twombly painting, Byars’s sculpture complicates our familiarity with the rose by combining its conventionality with its ultimate undoing. As a foil, Tony Feher’s funeral wreath Saint Rosalie Intercedes on Behalf of the Plague Victims of Palermo (1991) positions white plastic roses into a perfect circle, creating a dime-store gesture that will never diminish. Equal parts glamorous and devastating is Peter Hujar’s photograph Candy Darling on her Deathbed (1973), made at the performer’s invitation on the occasion of her inevitable passing due to terminal illness. Surrounded by lavish flower arrangements—as if in her dressing room after a show—Darling is recumbent under dramatic lighting, wrapped in hospital bed sheets, her make-up just so, with a single long-stem red rose lying next to her failing body.

Just as the rose is a natural form called upon to reinforce human connection, so too is it a commercial form used to advertise and sell products globally. Sara Cwynar’s video Rose Gold (2017), displayed in a black-box room on the second floor of the exhibition, examines this facet of the rose as an artificial construct that produces tangible reactions. Made in response to the release of Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone, the video mines the history of product development and color theory, making both the color itself and the products it is used for seem glossy and attractive, while also calling attention to their status as kitsch objects of a clichéd consumerism. Further complicating the romantic connotation of the rose is Taryn Simon’s Framework agreement for economic cooperation. Quito, Ecuador, January 12, 2012, 2015, Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015). The title of the work refers to the agreement between Ecuador and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), situating the rose as a witness to politics, governance, and globalization. Further expanding the cultural history of the rose and the rose as witness is Gabriella Hirst’s How to Make A Bomb (2015-ongoing). In response to a 1950s species of rose called Rosa floribunda ‘Atom Bomb,’ Hirst developed an interactive artwork wherein community members graft from the ‘Atomic Rose’ and surreptitiously plant the flower in public spaces, injecting the flower into collective consciousness as a vehicle for political violence.

FLAG would like to acknowledge the participating artists, artist estates, galleries, and private lenders for their generous loans of artworks to this exhibition.

oriolehamburg.com

karma.com

It isn’t easy to believe
the sky comes down to the ground
here, not just in the distance
behind the corner store where darkness
bleeds at the edges, but here, to say—
it is sky I’m breathing, as if that
implied heaven as well and perhaps
required something of us, like the effort
my daughter makes with her blue crayon
filling in between flowers, fence posts,
the branches of trees.

—Betsy Sholl, “Learning to Love the Sky” (1986)
Maine Poet Laureate

Karma presents A Particular Kind of Heaven, an exhibition of nearly one-hundred-and-twenty works spanning multiple disciplines by over seventy artists, on view at 70 Main Street, Thomaston, Maine, July 21 through September 1, 2024.

A Particular Kind of Heaven presents a wide array of empyrean imagery by a multigenerational group of artists. Sited in a deconsecrated Catholic church, the exhibition probes connections between the spiritual and the natural, the everyday and the sublime. While the near-universal motif of the sky unites the expansive contributions on view, the representation of this subject morphs and multiplies to span pictorial fealty, surrealist interpretation, lyrical rumination, narrative landscapes, geometric and gestural abstractions, three-dimensional works made of sweetgrass and post-consumer paper, and more. A Particular Kind of Heaven is titled after a 1983 Ed Ruscha text painting that calls attention to the idiosyncratic nature of our visions of the sublime and our projections about and on to the American landscape. The exhibition proceeds from dawn to dusk, following the transformation of the sky over the course of a day.

DAWN

The rising sun casts a hazy yellow glow through a veil of clouds in Yvonne Jacquette’s Grey Sky / Barn Side (1969), painted from observation at the artist’s summer home in Searsmont, Maine. The artist attends to her prosaic subjects—carefully-laid wooden boards, leaves stretching skyward, dawn—with a care that inches beyond realism and into the poetic. The foreglow of a sun not-quite-risen comes through in Jacquette’s subtly golden blues. Dawn is also the temporal setting of Norman Zammitt’s THEOGREY.4 (1988), in which the artist fractures light into horizontal stripes that thicken incrementally as they transition from black to periwinkle to simulate the diffusion of light through the smoggy skies of Los Angeles. Leonora Carrington described dawn as “the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence.” For a moment, all is still.

MIDDAY

The sun is climbing, and the air is beginning to heat up. Maureen Gallace revisits the landscapes of New England time and time again, here distilling clouded sky, horizon, ocean, sand, rock, into a scene of gesture and muted color. In contrast to her intimate canvas, Nathaniel Oliver’s monumental oil painting Over Here (2024) is a panoramic perspective on a mountainous landscape anchored by a lake whose contours pull the eye from the foreground up and through the horizon. A smoke signal suggests the presence of a figure who needs saving; we can use the remaining daylight to find them. Barkley L. Hendricks took breaks from painting his iconic figurative works each winter from 1983 until the early 2000s, escaping the dreary cold of New London, Connecticut, for the warmth and light of Jamaica, a pilgrimage he described as “following the sun to the Caribbean.” There, he worked en plein air to capture the island’s natural beauty, often finishing his small paintings in a single day. Hendricks’s Calabash Bay (Waterview), Jamaica, W.I. (1997), from his series of gold-framed landscape tondos, is a porthole to a world of sky and saltwater bisected almost symmetrically by an expansive horizon. The religious connotations of its form—tondos first became popular in fifteenth-century Italy as settings for Biblical scenes—honor the spiritual impact Jamaica had on Hendricks.

DUSK

As the day winds down, the clouds take on an apricot tinge in Dike Blair’s Untitled (2023), a gouache, pencil, and chalk rendering of an early evening sky. The chalk’s carefully smudged edges mimic the misty veils of color that change by the second during this transformative hour. Like all of Blair’s tableaux, which are based on the artist’s diaristic point-and-shoot photographs, Untitled is but a fleeting glimpse of the world’s banal sublimity. A new body of sky paintings by Blair inspired the theme of A Particular Kind of Heaven. Karma’s New York location will open an exhibition of these gouache works this fall. The orange glow in Seth Becker’s small oil Outrunning a Storm (2024) is even more transient. In thickly-applied daubs, he depicts a roiling tempest as it overtakes a majestic sunset, threatening a moment of peace as a kangaroo dashes ahead of the storm. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maine’s most famous poet, wrote: “Into each life some rain must fall / Some days must be dark and dreary.”

NIGHT

When evening sets in, even the brightest of summer days evaporate. Matthew Wong’s August Sky (2016) braids darkness and light; thick strokes of swirling, wet-on-wet acrylic evoke a terrifying, unpredictable nature that overpowers the human subject. The last vestiges of day reflect on a river traversed by a lone boatman, transforming into hallucinatory orange and purple shards. Alex Katz’s Study for Ocean 10 (2022) captures the light of the moon absent its source as it dances on the surface of the sea; the artist’s gestural white-on-black brushstrokes convey the water’s movement, weight, and transparency. Finally, Gertrude Abercrombie’s Landscape with Church (1939) sets the viewer at a distance, gazing down onto a road that leads to a white church suspiciously similar to the one in which the exhibition is set. A full moon glows auspiciously in the distance. In A Particular Kind of Heaven, the sky reaches beyond landscape and into pure abstraction, into the better-than-real texture of realism, into sculpture, into bending arcs of heavenly light refracting off of and changing the plane of the visible.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Henni Alftan, March Avery, Milton Avery, Seth Becker, Dike Blair, Louise Bourgeois, Katherine Bradford, Joe Bradley, Peter Bradley, Tom Burckhardt, David Byrd, Sean Cavanaugh, Mathew Cerletty, Andrew Cranston, Ann Craven, Verne Dawson, Rafael Delacruz, Nancy Diamond, Jane Dickson, Lois Dodd, Lynne Drexler, Matthew Tully Dugan, Inka Essenhigh, Melanie Essex, Hadi Falapishi, Marley Freeman, Jeremy Frey, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Will Gabaldón, Maureen Gallace, Sanaa Gateja, Robert Gober, Barkley L. Hendricks, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Ulala Imai, Yvonne Jacquette, Tamo Jugeli, Alex Katz, Zenzaburo Kojima, Hughie Lee-Smith, Jacob Littlejohn, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Kathryn Lynch, Calvin Marcus, Keith Mayerson, Richard Mayhew, Donald Moffett, Yu Nishimura, Nathaniel Oliver, Woody De Othello, Nicolas Party, Francis Picabia, Walter Price, James Prosek, Alice Rahon, Ugo Rondinone, Ed Ruscha, Maja Ruznic, Salvo, Trevor Shimizu, Marian Spore Bush, Hirosuke Tasaki, Mungo Thomson, Anh Trần, Tabboo!, Carole Vanderlinden, Nicole Wittenberg, Jonas Wood, Matthew Wong, Randy Wray, Xiao Jiang, Leon Xu, Manoucher Yektai, Joseph Yoakum, Albert York, Norman Zammitt, and Luigi Zuccheri

timothytaylor.com

Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce Dog Days of Summer, a group exhibition that centres on man’s best friend as a timeless subject in art history. Opening on 20 June in New York, the exhibition includes more than sixty works exploring the many roles a pup might play in the life of an artist: muse, metaphor, and companion.

This presentation features work by Craigie Aitchison, Trisha Baga, Sophie Barber, Hanna Brody, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Ann Craven, Scott Csoke, Anthony Cudahy, Alex Da Corte, Armen Eloyan, Camilla Engström, Julia Felsenthal, Louis Fratino, Robert Gober, Camille Henrot, Peter Hujar, Timothy Hull, Paul-Sebastian Japaz, Susumu Kamijo, Alex Katz, Karen Kilimnik, Craig Kucia, Sean Landers, Sophie Larrimore, Sahara Longe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eddie Martinez, Jesse Mockrin, Matthew Morrocco, Grandma Moses, Rocío Navarro, Justin Liam O’Brien, Gordon Parks, Hilary Pecis, Pablo Picasso, Paula Rego, Robert Roest, Will Ryman, Peter Saul, Allison Schulnik, Dana Schutz, Kiki Smith, Billy Sullivan, David Surman, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, William Wegman, and Jonas Wood.

Artmaking is a famously solitary process. What would art of the last century have been without such faithful studio mates as William Wegman’s Weimaraners or Pablo Picasso’s (ungenerously named) dachshund Lump? Dogs have been a feature of visual culture since at least 8,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers carved an image of leashed dogs into a sandstone cliff. A symbol of fidelity, protection, playfulness, and unconditional love, canines pop up in the paintings of Titian, Jan van Eyck, John Singer Sargent, and Gustave Courbet, among countless other masters.

Dog Days of Summer will feature Yellow Lab (2022), a stately seaside portrait in meticulous detail by Sean Landers, alongside works created specifically for the exhibition by Hilary Pecis, Jesse Mockrin, and Ann Craven. In Pecis’s Mango (2024), a smart, diminutive pup nestles into an array of pillows whose vibrant patterns seem to distort the perspective of an otherwise familiar domestic scene. Another lapdog appears in Mockrin’s graphite drawing Pearl (2024); here, the dramatic curl of a pug’s tail mirrors the Rococo embellishments of its owner’s gown. Elsewhere, Craven’s lush, painterly Magic and Moonlight in Night Field (2024), evokes the sinewy physicality and anthropomorphic nature of a French Bulldog.

Across these works, artists explore the specific body language and intimacies that humans share with their canine companions. Wegman’s photograph Look (1989) pictures four of the artist’s famous pets sitting uniformly in chairs, perfectly rapt, their piercing amber eyes presumably meeting those of the artist. In Jonas Wood’s etching Three Dogs (2020), the titular crew appears with tongues wagging, each gazing lovingly at the viewer, while Louis Fratino’s work on paper Man and Dog (2018) suggests the similar ways in which humans and dogs find comfort and connection.

Other works reflect the role of dogs in history and fantasy, consumerism and psychology. Karen Kilimnik’s seductive and shadowy painting friends in the woods (2010) references Old Master canine scenes, picturing a nocturnal gathering of dogs of various stock beside a steaming cauldron. Robert Gober’s 1976 photograph Untitled also features an assembly of breeds, zeroing in on three distinguished “eager eaters” in dog food branding. Peter Saul, with characteristic irony, plays on our expectations of our furry friends in the work on paper Watchdog (2011), depicting a dopey, deranged creature with a halo. And with the sculpture Lucy (2021), a Pop-inspired puzzle of a pup holding a flower, Alex Da Corte suggests dogs are more than they seem.

With paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs dating from 1915 to the present day and running the stylistic gamut, Dog Days of Summer offers up a collective portrait of our mutual evolution with our canine companions, in life and in art.

jamesfuentes.com

A Study in Form (Chapter Two) marks the second half of a two-part exhibition project curated by Arden Wohl that touches upon various relationships, dialogues, intersections, and companionships between artists and poets; and their poetry and art. Here, a range of disciplines, generations, and perspectives come together to push beyond the boundary of the visual artifact as an end point of the artwork.

Presenting work from over 70 artists, Chapter Two will be the final exhibition at 55 Delancey Street, where James Fuentes has been located since 2010 (the gallery was first established in the same neighborhood in 2007). In community, this project honors the gallery’s legacy on the Lower East Side and at the same time celebrates the future. From June of 2024, the gallery’s sole New York home will be at 52 White Street in Tribeca.

Chapter Two includes artworks by Alia Raza, Alice Attie, Alvaro Barrington, Amy Sillman, Ann Craven, Anton van Dalen, Bambou Gili, Becca Mann, Becky Howland, Ben Estes, Bennett Miller, Bryson Brodie, Charles Mayton, Charlie Ahearn, Cheyenne Julien, Cindy Sherman, Colleen Barry, Dana Schutz, Danny McDonald, Didier William, Dustin Yellin, Eleanor Friedberger, Eliza Douglas, Elsa Rensaa, Emily Sundblad, Gina Beavers, Greer Lankton, Hannah Black, Hannah Lee, Hans Accola, Helen Marden, Izzy Barber, Jane Dickson, Jenna Gribbon, Jennie C. Jones, Jennifer Herrema, Jessica Craig-Martin, Jessica Dickinson, Jim Jarmusch, Jo Messer, Joey Frank, John Ahearn, John McAllister, Jonah Freeman, Joshua Abelow, Julia Chiang, Justin Chance, Justin Lowe, Keegan Monaghan, Keith Riley, Kon Trubkovich, Leah Singer, Lee Dawson, Lee Quinones, Lee Ranaldo, Lily Ludlow, Lisa Robertson, Lizzi Bougatsos, Lua Beaulieu, Lukas Geronimas, Maggie Ellis, Marley Freeman, Matthew Barney, Matthew Higgs, Michael Berryhill, Michael Cline, Natalia Gaia, Nick Sandow, Oscar yi Hou, Pat Steir, Peter Halley, Peter McGough, Rachel Feinstein, Raúl de Nieves, Rebecca Watson Horn, Richard Heinrich, Ryan Johnson, Sadie Laska, Sahra Motalebi, Sam Messer, Sheree Hovsepian, Spencer Sweeney, Stefan Bondell, Stipan Tadić, Tauba Auerbach, Thom Zynwala, Troy Montes-Michie, Zoe McGuire, and poets hannah baer, Matvei Yankelevich, Anselm Berrigan, Anne Waldman, and Zêdan Xelef.

The ecosystem of the creative individual is a hard one to quantify or categorize. Sometimes groups emerge in well-defined movements with easily transmittable names—impressionists, minimalists, feminists—though most often, these descriptive nouns and adjectives only accrue long after the fact. (Alexandra Kollontai and Sheryl Sandberg both belong to the greater history of feminism, for example, but they might be perplexed to find themselves in the same boat.) Often, these names are not self-applied and function more as a marketing device than a useful and plausible heuristic for what is happening in any given historical moment. With any group, there is an individual effort to identify shared characteristics. What is that moment today, and is the situation of culture just as important as the solitary act of creation?

This is the realm of poetry and poet: the spirit that rejects explicit meanings and easily defined packages in favor of the lyrical and allusive. To disregard the pressure of commercial spectacle in favor of the quiet and personal is to defy the misconception that resisting market trends is useless. Poetic speech has its roots in humanity’s primordial creative endeavors. Were not the first written words images? I’d say that the preservation and propagation of poetic practice is just as fundamental as that of visual artwork.

The relationship between the visual arts and poetry is long and well established. “Ut pictura poesis”—pictures like poetry, the formula of the Roman poet Horace—is among the most influential directives to artistic expression since the Renaissance. Michelangelo wrote poems. But poetic and artistic influences often wend their ways along circuitous, unexpected, and perverse routes. Gertrude Stein was as famous for her gatherings that brought together artists and writers as she was for her writing. We know her for “Three Lives” and “The Making of Americans,” but Picasso’s looming, totemic portrait intrudes forcefully even for those who haven’t read her recondite prose and star-splattered verse.

Frank O’Hara was not only a poet but also an art critic and curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Marcel Broodthaers was a poet before he embarked on his mission to make “insincere” art objects. Now he’s accounted as the Arethusa of Institutional Critique: muse of the art world compulsively biting its own tail. Brice Marden’s “Cold Mountain” paintings took inspiration from the Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan—minimalism rerouted through a Floating World. While it would be impossible to make one reducible statement about the symbiosis of poets and artists, I would propose that the nurturing of creative community brings forward a collective energy that gives way to innovations in form and approach.

Though predominantly a collection of visual art, this exhibition beats with the heart of a poet. Its ambition is to position a group of artists and writers across generations and locations who are connected by a social and artistic foment. The scene, rather than something frivolous and fashionable, becomes a space where a group fosters collective boldness in stepping outside of accepted convention. This is not a show organized around simple aesthetic or demographic similarities. This show aims for a locus where the divergence of individual efforts finds communal reciprocity and fortification. In a moment when the social and cultural noise may feel deafening—and the artist’s work seems destined for the palette racks of eyeless dream brokers—this exhibition attempts to shift focus to the communal here and now.

—Arden Wohl

hannahhoffman.la

phillidareid.com

Love Will Come Back is an exhibition of paintings by Ann Craven, with work by Robert Mapplethorpe and Mohammed Z Rahman. The combination of artists, each working with the image and presence of doves, enacts a theme or rhythm of homing and homecoming: back to inspirations, influences, and the act of return. The show draws together the practices of three artists of exceptional sensitivity, iconographical awareness, and compositional acuity.

Craven’s process is compelled by a desire to revisit her own subject matter – a near-spiritual cycle, akin to a repeated prayer or mantra. This exhibition reunites one of Craven’s recurring compositions with the work that inspired it: Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1979 photograph Patti Smith, depicting Smith holding two white doves – one perched on each hand. The photograph was used as the cover art for Smith’s album Wave in the same year it was taken. In Craven’s painting series, titled Night Wave (I Promise) (begun in 2008), she lifts Mapplethorpe’s doves on to two delicately painted branches, holding their original positions and placed against her signature painted backgrounds inspired by the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. Craven’s Night Wave (I Promise, Blue), 2011, and  Night Wave (I Promise, Gray), 2024, sit alongside her new work – paintings of doves fluttering and taking flight.

Love Will Come Back is named for the also mantra-like phrase painted in braille across the four matchboxes that constitute Mohammed Z Rahman’s work Hard Vow (2023). Each box features a miniature painting of a dove in flight against an inky background, with one word of the phrase painted in braille above each of the dove’s heads. The work is a declaration for enduring peace and justice as well as a symbol of homing or return – return of love and, specifically, return of those displaced by widespread violence in Palestine, Sudan, Congo and Haiti.

Rahman’s 2024 Ashawalla (Hopemonger), similarly speaks to the honest wish for lasting peace, the historical end to genocides worldwide and the safe return of displaced peoples. The painting depicts a rock dove returning to a dovecote – based on Pimp Hall Dovecote in Chingford, North East London, an area where Rahman carries out voluntary nature conservation – flying over a lush green landscape and a moat-like red river.

The practice of the three artists in Love Will Come Back converse through timeless subject matter. The dove’s presence across the works underscores shared emotional threads and provides a constant, iconic motif, with its connotations of restfulness and hope indicative of its essential heart and understated life force.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, 1979, courtesy of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York, and Alison Jacques, London.

karmakarma.org

Karma presents Night, an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Craven, open from November 2 to December 20 at 22 East 2nd Street, New York.

The eight nocturnal paintings in Night survey major motifs of Ann Craven’s nearly thirty-year-long practice. For the first time, she has set all of her scenes in the darkness of evening, creating a consistent chromatic background that intensifies her always-vibrant colors. Craven primarily approaches her subjects in one of two ways: painting from observation or from appropriated sources, both her own former compositions and images from books, postcards, movies, posters, and other painters, notably Georgia O’Keeffe. The methods are intimately connected, as she often scales up and repaints her small en plein air paintings in the studio. These oils of moons, trees, birds, flowers, and deer constitute the latest chapter in her systematic catalog of what she terms “revisitations,” each of which is also a reinvention of her subject matter.

Craven’s methodical revisitations emerge from material and psychic loss. In 1999, a fire decimated her studio, existing work, and personal belongings. Her efforts to recover from the catastrophe led to her first copies, canvases painted from memories of her prior works, and initiated a lifelong project of duplication and reiteration. Lacking a single fixed referent, her paintings multiply serially from the realms of emotion and memory. Each of the artist’s works contains within it the entire history of her practice, forming a link in an index of representations of representations. Marking the mysterious hours between sunset and sunrise, Night acknowledges the centrality of time’s passage in the artist’s oeuvre—the lag between perceiving an object and painting it, the movement from one canvas to the next, the continuous rotation of our earth.

In Night, Craven’s brushstrokes describe her subjects as feathery, lush, and brimming with vital energy and tender feelings. Fawn in Night Field, 2023 (all works 2023) depicts a sad-eyed doe against a sea of brushy grass shrouded in darkness, and yet elemental daisies in white and girlish pink emit an otherworldly illumination as they leave the ground and float hazily through the night sky. This fawn has been a friend of Craven’s since she first painted it in 1998, when she appropriated the original image from the 1973 dystopian science fiction film Soylent Green. Her choice of animal is also in conversation with Gustave Courbet’s epic Realist work The Death of the Stag (1867)—After the studio fire, a deer painting stored offsite was the sole Craven canvas that remained. As such, and in contrast with Courbet’s fatally wounded stag, her fawn represents courage, perseverance, and hope.

Portrait of a Blue Bird (Night Song, After Picabia), 2023 shows the titular creature with its beak agape, as if heralding the beauty of the jimsonweed flowers in the background. A mysterious, anatomically incorrect second eye disrupts the scene’s naturalism, bending it toward the surreal and distinguishing it from past iterations of the composition. The white blooms reference O’Keeffe’s own paintings of the flower, while the title’s nod to Picabia acknowledges inspiration Craven found in the French avant-gardist’s Transparencies (1927–33), paintings that layer art-historical references with portraiture and natural imagery—birds, animals, trees—into multivalent compositions. Behind another warbling, chesty Northern bluebird resting atop a blooming branch in Bold as Love, 2023 is a swirling vortex of pastels. This tempest of abstract color evokes the minimalist-yet-riotous Stripe canvases that Craven makes from the mixed oil paint that remains once she finishes a work from her oeuvre. The rarely-exhibited Stripes comprise an indexical archive that the artist, in her words, “naughtily” hides away from the world, preserving them for her own future reference. Bold as Love, 2023 reprises a painting she first exhibited in 2007, ten years after she began rendering specimens from an ornithology book discovered in the basement of her deceased grandmother’s Boston home.

The bouquet is one of the newest motifs in Night, originating only thirteen years ago. Craven’s marks in Dahlia’s (For the Pink Moon), 2023 feel immediate, as if unmediated transmissions from the artist’s eye to the canvas. Her wet-on-wet technique allows the petals of one flower to flow seamlessly into the next. Here, and across her practice, figuration morphs into kaleidoscopic abstraction and back again, each canvas resisting easy categorization in favor of pure feeling. Craven “is painting,” in the words of poet Ariana Reines, “desire itself.”

In Purple Beech (Night Sky), 2023, a glowing moon peeks through the dense foliage of the titular deciduous shade tree, while in Moon (Crazy 8 Green Clouds), 2023, the earth’s satellite radiates lavender rings of light as gusts of wind and the artist’s signature infinity-symbol-shaped clouds float by. Craven’s moons have been central to her cosmology since they formed the sole subject matter of her one-person debut exhibition in 1995. These lunar paintings originate in nights spent outdoors, closely observing the celestial body and capturing it on canvas in near-darkness, with only the memory of her palette guiding her brush. The eight monumental works are accompanied by corresponding,  intimately-scaled oil paintings in the gallery’s viewing room, as well as a parallel group of watercolors on view at the Karma Bookstore at 136 East 3rd Street.

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Ann Craven paints en plein air to create exuberant depictions of the moon and night sky. These small canvases document the lunar conditions she observes at specific moments and become the source for her larger monumental compositions. Painting in a lush, sensuous palette, Craven describes the moment just past, her memories, and subjective personal experience. For her largest exhibition of these works to date, the artist transforms the gallery into a panorama representing the cycles of the moon, captured over the course of the 2022 lunar year. The works on view reveal both the serial nature of the artist’s larger endeavor and the myriad meanings the moon can convey. Collectively, they chronicle a distinct chapter in her ongoing process to creatively and beautifully encapsulate the wonders of the natural phenomena that surround us.

hannahhoffman.la

Hannah Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present Flowers (Watercolors), a solo exhibition of new works by Ann Craven, who lives and works in New York City and summers in Cushing, Maine.

“I learned how to paint by looking, by looking at something in the round and painting it,” Craven insisted last year in a conversation with her friend, the painter Lois Dodd. “I’ve always struggled with the idea that I just want to paint what I’m looking at and abandon all these sort of smart-ass things I try to do with birds and stuff [laughs] ….”* Forthright, witty, and self-aware, Craven’s comments hint at the heady mix of contradictions at the heart of her work. Her signature subjects birds, other animals, flowers, the moon – draw on direct observation as well as an expansive, personally curated archive of preexisting images.

For more than three decades, Craven has worked to dismantle the distinction between subjectively expressive art making and the ordered, cerebral practices often grouped under the heading of conceptual practice. She combines ostensibly lighthearted subject matter and a captivating handling of paint with a rule-bound, systematic approach to features like the size and titles of her compositions.

Craven’s effervescent palette and expert paint handling are evidence of her ability to get lost in the visual and textural pleasures of painting. Yet, when viewed together, her works also reveal a deliberate, iterative thinker. Craven’s mind is at once wholly engaged in the moment of making and keenly aware of the way the past always pierces the present. Her subjects exist in a temporal continuum–one that calls forth the purposeful workings and reworkings at the heart of a studio practice and the more mysterious machinations of visual and emotional memory.

The current exhibition features 18 new watercolors, all flowers, a medium particularly wellsuited to her concentration on the objects before her eyes and the drama of color on paper.

Ann Craven presented her first retrospective, titled TIME and curated by Yann Chevalier, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Karma, New York (2021); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine (2019); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2019); Karma, New York (2018); Southard Reid, London (2017); Maccarone, New York (2016); among others. Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, among others. Craven’s work is currently on display in the 2022 New England Triennial which spans two museum venues—deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and Fruitlands Museum.

* “It’s Going to Take Some Time”. Lois Dodd in conversation with Ann Craven. Animals Birds Flowers Moons, published by Karma, New York, 2021

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CHECKLIST

Ann Craven

Grocery Store Flowers (on Orange, Red Cherries, White St, May 1, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 26 x 20 inches (66 x 50.8 cm). Framed dimensions 28 x 22 inches

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Ann Craven

Grocery Store Flowers (on Black, Red Cherries, White St, May 1, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 26 x 20 inches (66 x 50.8 cm). Framed dimensions 28 x 22 inches

–

Ann Craven

Sunset Peony (White St, May 7, 2022), 2022, 2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 13 x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm). Framed dimensions 17 x 13 inches

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Ann Craven

Yellow Rose (Light through Queen Ann’s Lace, White St, May 8, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 13 x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm). Framed dimensions 17 x 13 inches

–

Ann Craven

Red Rose (Light through Queen Ann’s Lace, White St, May 8, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 13 x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm). Framed dimensions 17 x 13 inches

–

Ann Craven

White Roses (Black and White Fade, White St, May 5, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 22.5 x 15 inches (57.2 x 38.1 cm). Framed dimensions 24.5 x 17 inches

–

Ann Craven

Grocery Store Flowers (on Blue, Red Cherries, White St, May 3, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 22.5 x 15 inches (57.2 x 38.1 cm). Framed dimensions 24.5 x 17 inches

–

Ann Craven

Moonlight Brown-Eyed Susans (White St, May 3, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 22.5  x 15 inches (57.2 x 38.1 cm). Framed dimensions 24.5 x 17 inches

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Ann Craven

Roses (on Red with Hollyhock’s, White St, May 4, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 22.5 x 15 inches (57.2 x 38.1 cm). Framed dimensions 24.5 x 17 inches

–

Ann Craven

Sunset Peonies (White St, May 7, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 13 x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm). Framed dimensions 17 x 13 inches

–

Ann Craven

Red Dahlias (for the Moon, White St, March 30, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches Paper

Paper Dimensions: 13  x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm). Framed Dimensions 17 x 13 in

–

Ann Craven

Rose (for the Pink Moon, White St, May 9, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 13 x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm). Framed dimensions 17 x 13 inches

–

Ann Craven

Red Dahlias (for the Moon, Again, White St, April 1, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 26 x 20 inches (66 x 50.8 cm). Framed dimensions 28 x 22 inches

–

Ann Craven

Roses (on Blue with Red Tree, White St, March 24, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 26 x 20 inches (66 x 50.8 cm). Framed dimensions 28 x 22 inches

–

Ann Craven

Red Dahlias (for the Moon, Again, Again, White St, April 1, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 26 x 20 inches (66 x 50.8 cm). Framed Dimensions: 28 x 22 in

–

Ann Craven

Sunset Brown-Eyed Susan’s with Spring Weeds, (White St, May 6, 2022), 2022

2022

Watercolor on Arches paper

Paper Dimensions: 22.5 x 15 inches (57.2 x 38.1 cm). Framed dimensions 24.5 x 17 inches

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karmakarma.org

Karma is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring angel paintings by Reggie Burrows Hodges and moon paintings by Ann Craven. The show is set in the former St James Catholic church at 70 Main Street in Thomaston, Maine.

The angels and moons on display symbolically and literally explore the notion of light found in darkness. Deep hues of black and midnight blue set the stage for the heavenly icons, capturing them with a painterly effulgence—or radiating glow. Appearing throughout the canon of art history, these enduring celestial subjects have served as protectors and messengers. Craven and Hodges create warm and inviting interpretations of these guiding lights that allow the viewer to, in Hodges’s words, “offer up and be offered back.”

In Craven’s large-scale paintings, pink moons cast their light on to still water, through backlit trees. A cherished motif for the artist, Craven’s moons vary in brightness, describing the quality of light present in the specific night of their rendering. She painted her first moon in 1995 in Lincolnville, Maine, an activity that, in her words, “gave me my subject matter, I was literally chasing the moon.” Rendered in vivid hues and loose brushstrokes, her iconic moons are painted in plein air and diaristically titled with the location of their production: by St. George’s River, or in Cushing, Maine. Her true subject is the process of creation itself: in an almost ritualistic act, she serially repeats her lakeside moons, adding or removing trees throughout her variations. The viewer’s continual revisitation of this same subject throughout the exhibition space simulates a familiar encounter, conflating the momentary and the perpetual.

Incandescent and arresting, Hodges’s angels perch on the edge of benches and glide through the air, arranged in poses that echo canonical church-commissioned works by Renaissance masters such as Titian and Botticelli. Soft brushwork, hazy lines, and flat planes of subdued color acknowledge figurative forefathers such as Milton Avery, Edouard Vuillard, and Henri Matisse. Characteristic of his practice, the angels are formed from a dark ground; the artist fills in setting, scenery, and clothing, leaving the silhouettes of the angels to be shaped by negative space. In Sil (2021), a dramatically backlit angel greets the viewer, as if emerging from another world. In Luty (2021), an earth-bound angel gazes over a park, deep in thought.

Awash in light from windows and stained glass panels, the space echoes the luminescence of the paintings inside. The church site explores the historical precedent of placing heavenly icons in devotional spaces; in the words of Hodges, the show “brings these subjects home.” Unlike the standardized light of a traditional exhibition space, the fall of light upon the paintings merges setting and subject, room and artwork.

Photo credits: Dave Clough Photography

karmakarma.org

Karma is pleased to present Animals Birds Flowers Moons, a solo exhibition of recent paintings and watercolors by Ann Craven. Craven’s new subjects, including bear cubs, peacocks, woodpeckers, and horses, are a foray into childhood imagery and nostalgia—a provocative new Romanticism. Craven’s canvases reveal bold brushstrokes; their expressive painterly treatment signals the vitality and bravura of a new chapter in the artist’s oeuvre.

The exhibition is populated by an assorted cast of characters, animals, birds, flowers, and moons are repeated in varied scale and media throughout Karma’s three spaces. In moving from one space to the next, the viewer enters into the artist’s process of revisitation. Craven refers to her repetitions not as series—the term is too clinical—but as revisitations, expressing her tender desire to capture images again, and again, and again.

In each painting the artist superimposes source photographs, her own paintings, and historical works, creating mediated images that feature layers upon layers of referentiality: a collage of the artist’s most treasured curios. The motif in Big Moon (After Pink Full Moon over Quiet Water), 2021, 2021, is recorded and replicated with romantic diaristic affection. Portrait of Two Cardinals (after Picabia), 2021, 2021 indicates Craven’s admiration of an artist who gave her license to self-express, while its cardinals were inspired by the bird’s associations with hope and faith. In Roses (on Blue with Orchids, after Buffet), 2021, 2021, Craven paints the foreground en plein air and refers to her archive of printed images for the background––she becomes both master and copyist.

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph that mimics the tripartite structure of the show. The book is divided into three parts by installation grouping, each paired with one of three texts: two newly commissioned essays by Durga Chew-Bose and Keith Mayerson, and a 2021 interview between Ann Craven and Lois Dodd.

karmakarma.org

parapetrealhumans.com

In the French language, a pansy is called pensée, which means “a thought given.” The name is supposedly derived from its likeness to a pensive human face.

It is a flower that possesses a litany of artistic usage throughout history. Pensée is also a “bouquet” of flowers, or “thoughts”, inescapable as a middle ground between the worldly and the ethereal as an extended portrait of the human spirit. Rendering a chronology of thoughts about life and death, the artist dedicated this pensée project to the life of her mother.

Craven’s subjects are often of nature, fleeting things that shift and bloom in cycles of perpetual change, their representations as mercurial as their memories.

Ann Craven’s Pensée watercolors (all 23 x 15 inches) were exhibited first at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims France in 2008, then at Maccarone Gallery in New York City in 2011 as part of the show Ann Craven: Watercolors, and in 2016 at Galerie des Multiples in Paris in the show: 100%, 2015 + Flower Power.

In 2013 Karma Books published “PENSÉE.” This 98 page book gathers the entire series of ninety-two pensée watercolors that Ann Craven painted in 2007-08 while in residency at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, France.

Ann Craven is renowned for her bold portraits of the moon, birds and flowers. Major solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, KARMA, Southard Reid, and Nina Johnson Gallery, among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hammer Museum, among others. She currently lives and works in New York City.

southardreid.com

American Birds (Endangered, Extinct, after Audubon), 2018-19 marks the first exhibition of a new series of paintings by Ann Craven (born Boston, lives and works in New York City).

American Birds (Endangered, Extinct, after Audubon), 2018-19 includes paintings of seven distinct birds, rendered in oil on linen, across three scales, lifting from John James Audubon’s compositions whilst with freedom echoing her own language, inserting backdrops or “wallpaper”. These include signature flowers and fruits, sunset fades, and painterly collages of homage, including to Picabia and O’Keefe. In this homage to Audubon, Craven’s selected birds are chosen for their endangered, near extinct or extinct category.

Craven’s selection to begin this new series – her series most often recur, which she calls “continuums” – are from within those birds painted by Audubon in Birds of America, first published 1827, that today are threatened or have been extinguished. The culmination of looking closely at Audubon’s imagery as source material, from her huge accumulated archive of bird books, nature magazines, cinema, YouTube and web screenshots, is significant to Craven’s wider practice. She chooses entities from the natural world that have power in reality, and also as images, symbolically, emotionally, psychologically. Birds, and Craven’s other subjects from nature, foremost the moon, also deer, panda, cats, derive and continue to elicit iconic status as images, across culture “high” and “low”, historically and today.

Humankind’s physical and psychologically conflicted relationship with nature, at once destructive, oppressive, however also commemorative and celebratory, has been a consistent thematic concern for Craven, foundational to her own philosophy being the belief in nature’s ascendancy and ultimate triumph over humans.

In American Birds (Endangered, Extinct, after Audubon), 2018-19, the emphasis on protection and preservation merges conceptually with Craven’s painting process. The blending of emotional and systematic return to a repertoire of subjects from nature, revisited and re-presented, symbolizes an act of life-force, acknowledgement of cycles of life, examination of memory, and the pre-eminence of not only nature, but also time, painting its passing as record. Craven calls this “The continuous just past.”

cmca.org

Rockland, ME —The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) will present a major exhibition of artist Ann Craven’s paintings beginning June 29 and continuing through October 13, 2019. The exhibition will be the first show of the noted artist’s work in Maine, where she has been a seasonal resident and has been painting for more than 25 years.
 
Ann Craven is widely known for her lushly colored, mesmerizing portraits of the moon, birds, flowers, and other images, which she revisits in serial fashion, as well as her painted bands of color, which document her process. Craven says, ”My paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment, and chance, and contain a variable that’s constant and ever-changing—the moment just past.”  
 
Birds We Know will present a comprehensive selection of the artist’s work, and will be accompanied by an illustrated, hardcover catalog with an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, founding curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and former director, Farnsworth Art Museum.
 
In the essay, Crosman states, “…Ann Craven’s birds, moons, trees, and her stripe and palette paintings all enforce the hard stop our mind and eye make before inexplicable paintings, paintings that affirm an inseparability of beauty, truth and virtue. This is painting at its most authentic and original, at its most memorable and tenderly remarkable.”
 
Craven began painting in Maine in the early 1990s. First in a borrowed barn near Slab City Road in the mid-coast village of Lincolnville, then from her own barn that she converted to a studio on a farm she purchased nearby. Lincolnville and the surrounding region has harbored artists for decades, beginning in the 1950s when Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd and other New York-based artists started summering in the area. It was on Lincolnville beach, a small strip of sand anchored by The Lobster Pound restaurant, that Craven painted her first “Moon” painting in 1995. The experience, she says, “gave me my subject matter, I was literally chasing the moon.”
 
For Craven, painting serial versions of the moon on site was a way to conflate the momentary with the constant. The moon became for her a symbol of time and memory, themes that remain the primary focus of her work. The paintings of birds soon followed, inspired by color-plates found in her Italian grandmother’s vintage ornithology books. Like the moon the birds serve as a touchstone for memory, each repetition of the image a revisiting of a moment, a recalling of loved ones.
 
In 2008, Craven moved from Lincolnville to an historic house on the banks of the St. George River in Cushing. The property had an old garden shed that became her new studio and, importantly, a majestic purple beech tree hugging the shore. This 100-plus-year-old tree is Craven’s newest motif. “It reminded me of the moon,” she says, “because it was round and because of all the life it had seen. Families coming and going, life lived. Like the moon it’s a constant that ebbs and flows, but the opposite of the moon in that it changes with the day and becomes a silhouette against the sunset.”
 
Craven is a diarist, each of her paintings is inscribed with the date and time of its making, and she meticulously inventories and records each year’s work. Recently she began exhibiting her extensive series of Untitled (Palettes), ranging from 1999 to present. Painting wet on wet in oils, she mixes her colors on light-duty pre-stretched canvases. “The Palettes are my indexed color inventory,” she says. “They are a way for me to hold on to what I just painted—a moon or flower or bird.”
 
In addition to numerous group exhibitions worldwide, Craven had her first retrospective, titled TIME, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France, in 2014. Other recent major solo exhibitions include Promise (Birds for Chicago), Shane Campbell, Chicago, 2019; Sunset Moon, Karma, NY, 2018; Snowbirds, Nina Johnson, Miami, 2018; Animals 1999-2017, Southard Reid, London, 2017; Hello, Hello, Hello, Maccarone, NY, 2016, and Ann Craven, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, 2014.
 
Her work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art News, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The New Yorker, Frieze, among others. Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and private collections worldwide.
 
Ann Craven | Birds We Know is made possible at CMCA with support from Max Mara, and individual donors.

shanecampbell.com

karmakarma.org

Karma is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Craven. This is the artist’s first presentation with the gallery.

The exhibition is comprised of two bodies of new paintings: Birds and moons. Like much of Craven’s practice, these works are both jubilant acts of art making and ruminative meditations on time and the nature of memory, or what Craven terms “the continuous just past.”

Craven began painting birds in 1997, and, since 2002, has completed a cycle of works every year. All her birds, including the yellow, pink, and blue canaries present here, are all based on images from a single book, which Craven returns to as both a grounding source and a launchpad for inspiration. The 2018 paintings, are comprised of variable bands of color, like sunsets, which ground both her subject and the viewer in lush hues. When flowers emerge, they are often taken from one of Craven’s art historical inspirations, Georgia O’Keefe. For Craven, her bird paintings have totemic power: each is unique but each is also a stand-in for the people and scenarios she might have painted, were she a portrait painter. They embody memories, and offer a chance for the artist to covet her artistic history while encoding it with her current inner-life.

If the birds are an act of meditation on a mediated image, then Craven’s continuum of moon paintings, initiated in 1995, are a celestial diary. She paints them at night with just a small lantern, barely able to see her tools. And so her palette is set up, from left to right, with white, yellow, orange, red, cobalt blue, green, brown, and black, so that she can stay focused entirely on her subject and paint from instinct. As she told Dana Miller, “Because I have painted with oils (from observation) since a child, with the colors on the palette laid out for mixing in the same order forever, the mixed color is like a non-thought—it’s like breathing for me—it just occurs because it’s supposed to. Meaning I mix color with the same innate sensibility as I use to walk or breathe.” These direct paintings then become sources for larger paintings, in which she can focus on the conscious act of rendering a subject and the remembering of a memory. In this way, as with her canaries, Craven both holds on to her past and expands her present.

Karma has published a comprehensive 560-page monograph of Ann Craven’s paintings, with essays by David Salle and Sarah French, and curator Dana Miller.

MACCARONE, New York
ADAA’s The Art Show
February 28 – March 4, 2018
Park Avenue Armory
Park Avenue at 67th Street
New York
 
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NINA JOHNSON, Miami

January 26 – March 10, 2018

Nina Johnson is pleased to announce Snowbirds, Ann Craven’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, opening with a public reception on Friday, January 26th (7-9 pm), and remaining on view until March 10th, 2018.

As the Northern United States are blanketed in an atmosphere of frost and snow, Ann has found herself delving deep into the coldest recesses of the country, painting extensively in her native Northeast Corridor – from Maine to Connecticut. Continuing her interest of the classical image of a bird perched on a branch, this exhibition is filled with Craven’s iconic bird paintings- intuitive, gestural and responsive to a frosted climate and the creatures that choose to stay within it. These singular small-scale paintings relish in the isolation and frosted blue light of winter, meanwhile Craven’s pinks and bright colors remain steady, bearing and possessing the promise of spring.

About Ann Craven

Having exhibited and worked extensively since the late-90’s, Ann Craven’s works are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney, The New Museum, the ICA Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and various other institutions and prestigious private collections around the world. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art News, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The New Yorker and Frieze, among others.

About Nina Johnson

Nina Johnson is a contemporary art space in Miami, Florida. Opened as Gallery Diet in 2007, the gallery has produced exhibitions by emerging and established artists from around the world.

SOUTHARD REID, London
26 April – 24 June, 2017

Animals 1999 – 2017 is the first show devoted to Ann Craven’s Animal subjects. It features oil paintings of Deer, Cats (or Kittens), Pandas and Birds – Craven’s Icons that she has painted, along with the Moon and Flowers, since the outset of her practice.
 
The works derive from Craven’s extensive photo archive of treasured pets, her thousands of accumulated printouts of screenshots, scans from animal magazines, cinema, you-tube, the web. She is drawn to these animals for personally emotional as well as universal association. The 1973 American sci-fi thriller film Soylent Green proved to be a profound influence on Craven as a child, from the perspective of a nature guardian and devotee. Her animals – although sweet and kind – represent powerful strength. In Craven’s paintings of Animals, humans’ ability to destroy nature fails – she feels that nature will always win in the end.
 
Craven’s painting Young Buck (The Life Of The Fawn), Facing Left and Facing Right, 2005, 84×120 inches, depicts two Young Deer, mirrored in this case. Craven’s detail in the title “The Life of the Fawn” refers to Gustave Courbet’s 1859 painting “The Death of the Stag”, here asserting a life – not – death discussion, with nature’s ability to survive.
 
Craven’s Animals have their own iconic status in traditional and popular culture. They appear at once historical and are strongly present in contemporary media. These iconic images are sometimes considered cute or beautiful, and can be infantilized by “girlish” appeal. Meanwhile, acknowledging their given status and association with adorability and handsomeness, Craven’s paintings of a Deer, a Cat, a Panda or a Bird connects with and seeks to explore the genuine meaning of both power and defenselessness.
 
Craven’s Animals are not harmful or threatening, they all have an association with freedom, wildness and vulnerability.
 
Deer, Cats and Pandas are usually depicted alone, their gaze directed outside the painting. They meet a human eye with the poignancy of their unarmed status, which at the same time contains a higher knowledge of the ascendancy of Nature, its timelessness if protected, and thus the threat and senselessness of human cruelty.
 
Birds similarly symbolize freedom, whilst also the desire to tame. In Craven’s practice they are stand-ins for human situations and feelings. She has referred to them as costumed actors in a play or opera, appearing in recurring compositions, on branches in various communicative stances, with Flower “wallpaper” backdrops – the human aspect of the scenarios is reflected also in their recurring series’ titles “Hello, Hello, Hello”, “I’m Sorry”, “So Sorry”, “I Promise”, to name a few.
 
The exhibition also includes a Stripe painting – the most recent work in the show – Triptych (Pink Canary Stepping Out, Lavender, Stripe, 3-13-17 – 3-14-17), 2017. The stripes in Cravens paintings are literally the unused colour from her palettes of the subject just painted. The simple gesture of placing stripes of colour mixtures documents her painting process as a notation, or transcription of logged time, like a tape recorder – “the lining up, or Striping of the colour allows me to see the raw process unfiltered by association of what I just painted.”

This work closes the show, a reminder of cycles, ends as beginnings, and the conceptual underpinning of Craven’s pursuit, synthesized with exploration of image and emotional response.

Ann Craven (born Boston USA), lives and works in New York City. She has exhibited widely internationally, her retrospective, TIME, curated by Yann Chevalier was at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France (2014) and other recent solo exhibitions include Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis, Missouri, USA (2017); Hello, Hello, Hello, Maccarone, New York, USA (2016); Untitled (Palettes: Naked, Tagged), 2013-14, Southard Reid, London (2015); Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Hello, Hello, Hello, Southard Reid, London (2013); Shadow’s Moon and Abstract Lies, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France (2008). Her work has been included in shows at Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; White Columns, New York; Gladstone, New York and 39 Great Jones, amongst others. Craven’s work has been reviewed in many publications including Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, New York Times, Frieze and Modern Painters. Her paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum, New York, the New Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and The Dallas Museum of Art.

All photos: c. Lewis Ronald

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PARAPET REAL HUMANS, St Louis
April 14 – May 30, 2017

Curated by Amy Granat

Ann Craven is a painter based in New York City. The portrait and moon paintings record specific coordinates that the artist occupies at a given moment. They reflect back on the artist’s life, like a sky map. The painting Portrait of Amy (8-20-12), 2012 was painted in Cushing Maine on August 20, 2012. Craven’s oil paintings of the moon and portraits began in 1990’s as a way to explore variations on a theme or prolongation of “subject” or “subject matter” from an observation starting point.
 
In 2015, Craven began exhibiting her extensive series of Untitled (Palettes) – created from 1999 to present – in which she has been mixing color directly onto light-duty pre-stretched canvases. The palette at Parapet Real Humans titled Untitled (Robin, 2-21-11), 2011 was used to mix the colors for A Robin Singing, 2011.
 
Guided by minimalist tendencies, Craven’s Stripe Paintings contain the unused colors from her palettes. The simple gesture of striping or painting her unconscious color mixtures records the process as a “notation” or “transcription of logged time” like a tape recorder. This stripe painting titled Stripe (Portrait of a Robin, 2-23-11), 2011 was made from the unused color from the palette after painting A Robin Singing, 2011.
 
Craven sees no differentiation from the four canvases in this exhibition – a portrait, a bird, a stripe or a palette and treats them as the same entity, thus taking the hierarchy out of “subject” – placing more emphasis on the unbridled process of “form”.
 
To be sure, Craven uses subject matter such as birds, birds, flowers and the moons in her multiple wet on wet paintings. Meanwhile, she neutralizes her storybook content through continual variations and repetitions, thus removing any sense of preciousness in the work whilst shifting the conversation about her work into a theoretical frame that considers the body as a whole, rather than its individual parts. By reworking, re-presenting and returning to the same stock subject matter, Craven engages questions of authenticity, collection, consumption and skill, thus examining the durability of a painted icon in a world that consumes mass imagery at record speeds.

About Ann Craven:
In addition to numerous group exhibitions, Ann Craven’s (American) major solo exhibitions include her current show: Animals 1999- 2017 at Southard Reid, London; Hello, Hello, Hello at Maccarone, NYC in 2015; I like Blue at Gallery DIET, Miami in 2015; Untitled (Palettes: Naked, Tagged), 2014-15, at Southard Reid Gallery, London in 2015, and Ann Craven at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles in 2014. She has three Artist Monologues of her work including Ann Craven: TIME (Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers France); Ann Craven: Shadows Moon and Abstract Lies (JRP Ringier and FRAC Champagne Ardenne); Ann Craven: Pensée, (Karma Books and Maccarone) which highlights ninety-two watercolors of the pansy flower painted by Craven between 2007-2008 while in residence at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne. Ann Craven lives and works in New York.

www.parapetrealhumans.com

MACCARONE, New York
January 21 – March 5, 2016
630 Greenwich Street
98 Morton Street

Maccarone is pleased to present Hello, Hello, Hello, an exhibition focusing on three historical bodies of work from Ann Craven’s singular practice that show the painter moving forward through constant referral to earlier moments. In several ongoing series of paintings, the artist’s decade-spanning reiterations confront the issue of authenticity through a strategy of limitless repetition.

The show takes its title from three sets of triptychs painted over the past fourteen years. Each is an increasingly mediated representation of the same source image: an African grey parrot the artist first discovered in her grandmother’s book on caring for caged birds. The original triptych was painted in 2002. The title, Hello, Hello, Hello, mimics the vocalizations of the birds — rote and sonic, devoid of linguistic heft. In 2004, she repainted the series, scaling up their size and retitling them as HELLO, HELLO, HELLO. She revisited the series once more in 2013, creating three new images. Though Craven paints from observation, often en plein air, when painting birds, she insists upon the distance provided by a mediating image, be it a photograph of a bird or an earlier painting. Each painting is both a continuation of that which came before, and a response; it is in this conversational volley that the performative element in Craven’s practice becomes clear. Her paintings breathe in the liminal space between original and copy, between call and response.

A fourteen-piece stripe work accompanies the 2013 parrot paintings. Completed in tandem with her other works, these minimalist compositions are a depository for paint leftover from other paintings in her studio. The works on display were painted over a three-month period in 2013 during which Craven worked on the third series of parrot paintings. As such, the colors of beaks, plumage, and the floral backdrop condense into bands of color on the canvas. The stripe paintings are simultaneously an abstracted version of her other work and a series of tree rings — a core sample boring through the entire practice.

A selection of recent works and several of Craven’s untitled palette paintings will also be on display. For many years, Craven has used 24-by-18-inch canvases as palettes, completing them alongside her other series. Like the stripe paintings, they index the materials, gestures, and time spent painting. Here, the record is unmoored from imagery, composition, and intention; it is pure evidence, raw time.

Hello, Hello, Hello operates through conceptual subterfuge. By stripping the rigors of conceptualism of any opaque posturing, the artist communicates the bare, immediate truths of painting.

Ann Craven lives and works in New York City and Cushing, Maine. She recently had her first retrospective, Time, curated by Yann Chevalier at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France (2014). She has exhibited widely, including the Green Gallery, Milwaukee (2013); Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2013); White Columns, New York (2013); Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2013); Gladstone, New York (2012); and Marianne Boesky, New York (2012). Craven’s work has been reviewed in publications including the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, the New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, the New Yorker, Frieze and Modern Painters. Her paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; the New Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others. Craven’s new monograph Time, designed by Manon Lutanie, was published by Le Confort Moderne this past year.

maccarone.net

Gallery Diet, Miami

Opening November 30^th 5-8 pm

November 30^th – January 9^th, 2016

MIAMI (November 25th, 2015) – Gallery Diet is pleased to present I Like Blue­­­­, an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Craven opening November 30^th, 2015 with a public reception (5-8 pm) and remaining on view until January 9^th, 2016. Through these paintings, Craven converses with the histories of landscape painting and conceptual art, and with the passage of time itself.

These paintingscome from summers spent in Cushing, Maine, where Craven has kept a home and studio for years. At night, she paints the moon en plein air, often by candlelight. Slightly larger than a square foot, they are hasty compositions, with a pared down palette and an economy of gesture. Like consecutive views of the moon, they manage to be both the same and different. Painting outdoors, under a sky quite different than that above New York, Craven engages contemporary and historic painters such as Alex Katz (who she assisted for seven years) Georgia O’Keeffe and Claude Monet. Yet the landscape is just a starting place. Craven returns to her New York studio and remakes the paintings, scaling up the intimate size of the originals to five square feet. They are not exact remakes; neither the palette nor the brushstroke are the same, merely similar.

By repainting the original paintings, she does not delegate a hierarchy of preparatory version and final product. Rather, she loosely stacks three moments of time: the time spent on the first painting, the time elapsed between the two paintings, and the time spent painting the second version. In this, she charges the landscape genre with the understanding of temporality similar to the conceptual practices of On Kawara or Agnes Martin. The system Craven uses to employ the leftover, unused paint into bands of color can be seen as the forth phase or a closure to the three moments mentioned above.It is an added pleasure to see these works in Miami, a place known for its charged relationship to nature and history.

I Like Blue continues Craven’s exploration of painting as an index of our lived experience. Though painted with immediacy, Craven understands that these works can never fully capture the moment they seek to address. Instead, there is a lag, an inescapable temporal parallax. It is in that space that she best operates. Her work is playful, yet, since inseparable from time’s flight, bittersweet. Also on view is a painting of a bird.

Ann Craven lives and works in New York City and Maine. She recently had her first retrospective, Time, curated by Yann Chevalier at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France (2014).She has exhibited widely, including Southard Reid, London (2015); Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Maccarone, New York (2013); The Green Gallery, Milwaukee (2013); Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2013); White Columns, New York (2013); Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2013); Gladstone, New York (2012); and Marianne Boesky, New York (2012). Craven’s work has been reviewed in publications including LA Times, Art in America, the New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, The New Yorker, Frieze and Modern Painters. Her paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; the New Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others. Gallery Diet owner Nina Johnson-Milewski assisted Craven in 2005

Gallery Diet is a contemporary art space in Miami, Florida. Since 2007, the gallery has produced exhibitions by emerging and established artists from around the world. The gallery works alongside artists to produce ambitious projects both within the confines of the gallery space and beyond.

GALLERY DIET 6315 NW 2nd AVE MIAMI FL 33150 WWW.GALLERYDIET.COM +1.305.571.2288

Image: Ann Craven, Moon (Manganese Moon, Cushing, 8-30-15, 933PM), 2015, 2015, 14 x 14 inches

SOUTHARD REID, London
6 June – 18 July 2015

Southard Reid is proud to present Ann Craven’s third solo show at the gallery.

Untitled (Palettes: Naked, Tagged), 2013-14 is based around Craven’s Untitled (Palette) paintings, the works that are the starting point of her cyclical, time-based painting practice. The following is extracted from Untitled (Palettes, Moons, Birds, Flowers), 2014, published by the Ann Craven Studio on the occasion of this exhibition:

“In November and December 2014, I showed the small Moon, Bird and Flower paintings (which I call my ‘2014 Laboratory’) along with the large Bird and Moon paintings at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles. In the summer of 2015, I am showing all the Untitled (Palettes) that were used to make the Lab and larger paintings, at Southard Reid in London.

At Southard Reid, the Untitled (Palette) paintings are on the wall in the order that they were made. My palettes are stretched canvases and they contain the dried leftover paint that I used to mix the colors of the paintings – Moon, Bird and Flower paintings – large Bird and Moon paintings – from 2013 and 2014.

I use stretched canvases for palettes because its easier to mix color on a canvas than on paper palettes, and two 24 x 18 inch canvases fit perfectly side by side on my studio table. They are strong and sit steady on the table so I can mix and not worry about anything. It’s always been like this.

I title the paintings Untitled (Palettes) because I feel they are no longer palettes once I finish mixing the color for the Moon or Bird or Flower or Deer paintings.

I mark them with a quick drawing on the top of the palette it helps me to remember what I just painted but it also adds something special to the process for me. It allows me to call to mind the color I mixed – which makes it more like a recall or a repeat of that moment. And sometimes I leave the Untitled (Palettes) naked because they look good without a drawing.

I think that the Untitled (Palettes) function as memory.

They are an echo of the time spent making a painting and a ricochet of the moment just past. They are an innocent by-stander to the memory of what was painted. And I can revisit these colors when I need them. It’s like revisiting an old friend.

It is hard for me to show these paintings because they are so close to me. Showing them always makes me nervous because I feel like I am exposing myself to everyone. But that’s ok, because sometimes things have to be hard to make the difference.”

– Ann Craven, May 25, 2015

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Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles
November 15 – December 20, 2014

Hannah Hoffman Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new oil paintings by Ann Craven, November 15th – December 20, 2014. These paintings of Birds, Moons, and Flowers were made during Craven’s time in her Maine studio along the St. Georges River.

2014 marks the nineteenth year of Craven’s moon paintings. Craven paints her small oil canvases by nocturnal observation, creating anywhere from one to ten paintings on a given night. The size is always the same, like a song or repeated mantra, and in this exhibition they are hung like one long sequential thought or filmstrip.

Also present and painted by observation are the Jewelweed and Rosa rugosa flowers that grow abundant around her studio in Maine. The Jewelweed is revisited many times throughout the exhibition. Acting as both atmosphere and environment for the birds the Jewelweed is as invasive in the show as it is in the Maine landscape where it grows wild and widespread. This flower also acts as a backdrop – like what you might find in formal portraiture – and is housed in Craven’s acid pink color.

Painted from the 14 x 14 inch moon paintings are the larger canvases titled Moon (Simple Bright Moon With Purple Sky), 2014, 2014 and Moon (Bright Moon Through Trees With Purple Sky), 2014, 2014. These larger paintings are realized with upgraded scale and bigger brushstrokes. “This action of transferring and enlarging charts the distance between lived experience and recreation. The past is folded imperfectly into the present, sacrificing one notion of truth in pursuit of another.’ (Blair Hansen, 2013)

As with the moon and flower paintings, the owls in Owl (Barred Owl Looking), 2014, 2014, Owl (Barred Owl Looking Slightly Away), 2014, 2014, and Owl (Great Horned Looking), 2014, 2014, are subjects taken from the landscape of Maine. Instead of working observationally from life, Craven paints them from an archive of thousands of printed pictures and found images that she has collected. The final paintings embody a constant push and pull – coupling the digital with the natural and the observational with the mediated.

Doves (Pink Thinking Of You With Doves), 2014, 2014 is a pair of Doves nestled against a background of yellow orchids. Echoing across time, exhibition histories, past and present the work is a recollection of Pink Thinking Of You, 2004 and I Promise, 2004, originally shown at Paolo Curti / Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co in Milan. Shown here in the City of Angels, the Doves in Doves (Pink Thinking Of You With Doves), 2014, 2014, are pulled from the album cover of Patti Smith’s Wave (1979).

 
Ann Craven has exhibited widely in USA and Europe. Selected solo shows include Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (2014); Maccarone, NYC (2013, 2011 and 2010); Southard Reid, London (2013 and 2011); Ann Craven, Reims Moon at 39 Great Jones, New York; Ann Craven at Conduits, Re-map3, Athens, Greece, 2011; Shadows Moon, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne Reims, France, 2009; Against the Stream, The Sculp- ture Centre, NYC, Snoom, Delaware Centre for Contemporary Art, DE, 2008; Selected recent group shows include Ambulance Blues curated by Erin Falls, 2014, Basilica Hudson; Souvenir curated by Lucie Fontaine, Galerie Perrotin, Paris, 2013; 39GreatJones, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, 2013; and The Spirit Level, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 2012, both curated by Ugo Rondinone; Chaos as Usual, Bergen Kunsthall Nor- way, 2011. Ann Craven Penseé published by Karma International and Maccarone was published in 2013. Shadows Moons and Abstract Lies by JRP Ringier, 2009.

hannahhoffmangallery.com

Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers
May 28 – August 24, 2014
Curated by Yann Chevallier

An exhibition by Ann Craven. Including the entire AC laboratory from 2013 and related large scale works from 2002 to 2013.

To select a group of Ann Craven’s works to organize an exhibition seems simple at first since all works originate from an identical process, are crossed by recurring motifs, and share a style that is immediately recognizable. One considers selecting the works randomly by bringing together subject, motif or format. It then strikes us the exceptional amount of work produced by the artist, and it comes to mind that the only valid exhibition would be to gather all, to show everything. Again a problem, the warehouse gallery is not large enough … Once this first hypothesis was dismissed with regret, we chose to highlight several fundamental ideas in Craven’s work: time, profusion, system and attachment.

Time
A fundamental aspect of Craven’s work lies in its ability to register itself within time. Behind each canvas, we irreparably find the same information: year, month, day, and even the hour of completion of the works. A futile attempt to secure the passing of time, to retain the evanescent memories, to feel once again the emotions that had accompanied the brush. The exhibition brings together the whole collection of works painted in 2013, hung in the order of their production. This objective chronology partially structures the exhibition.

Profusion
The exhibition features over 200 works by the artist; this is her most substantial exhibition yet. This quantitative element cannot stand as a critical argument, although it helps to understand the intensity of the work, both the abnegation and voracity of the artist, and gives a new dimension to the idea of series, paramount in her work.

A Seamless System
Painting is often a history of systems and the one set up by the artist is impressive. Ann paints in series, motifs found on the spot at first, as the moons painted outdoors in her native Maine. These primal works are what she calls her laboratory, a collection of paintings that serve as her reservoir. These paintings are reinterpreted, reframed, resized in the studio to make new works emerge. The paint used is recycled into diagonal stripes on other canvases and the palettes also become paintings. Everything is recycled and a distance to the original subject is created, while keeping its memory. An attempt to empty the subject from its meaning, from its original story, to reduce it to the state of motif.

A Sustained Sympathy
Despite the systematic activity and infinite reproduction of subjects without an a priori quality, a sustained sympathy establishes itself amidst Craven’s works. A persistent affection operates in front of each canvas, as if each one of its flowers, its moons, its birds and its trees referred us to a love gone, a friendship lost or a loved one that we remember with nostalgia and goodwill.

Yann Chevallier, Poitiers, 2014
confort-moderne.fr  |  On Youtube
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Maccarone, New York
November 8 – December 14, 2013

Maccarone is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ann Craven, opening November 8th, 2013. These paintings grew out of Craven’s recent time in her Maine studio along the St Georges River.

2013 marks the eighteenth year of Craven’s moon paintings. Craven paints small oil canvases by nocturnal observation – creating anywhere from one to ten paintings on a given night. In a process she regularly applies, Craven remakes a selection of these on larger canvases. This action of transferring and enlarging charts the distance between lived experience and recreation. The past is folded imperfectly into the present, sacrificing one notion of truth in pursuit of another.

A new subject for Craven is the purple beech tree. As with the moon paintings, Craven paints the tree at dusk or through the night. There are clear dichotomies between Craven’s moon and tree: the moon forever shifts its shape behind a morphing shroud of cloud and atmosphere, emanating and reflecting light; the beech tree, represented in vibrating silhouette, goes nowhere in particular – a dark witness anchored to the ground, concealing and absorbing. Though pared toward abstraction, both moon and tree lose nothing of their potency by way of Craven’s ardent brushstroke. These subjects summon the volatility of both micro- and macro-physical forms; they seem to describe as much a gigantic, silent explosion in outer space as they do a subatomic particle itching to burst open.

Although the paintings originate from diverse moments, their singular memories are fused together when presented in sequence. The repetition of subject bounces the eye between similar points in order to confirm their differences, favoring the prospect of the infinite over the sanctity of the original.

Craven’s band paintings are diagonal strips of color laid down from the remaining paint on her palette after every moon and tree’s completion. Here, we read the story of Craven’s laboratory process in perpetual, leaning hues of hypnotic thickness; each band painting describes its kindred artwork, interlocking the entirety of Craven’s project. The ticking bands of color further unbind her paint from the stasis of subject matter to form an evolving record of, in Craven’s words, “the continuous just-past.” – Blair Hansen, 2013

maccarone.net

Southard Reid, London
12 October – 23 November 2013

Southard Reid is proud to present Hello, Hello, Hello by Ann Craven, her second solo show with the gallery. Craven’s show sets up a series of echoes in painted and printed form, across time and exhibition histories, past and present.

Craven first painted an African grey parrot, the subject of the series of Hello, Hello, Hello paintings, in 2002, as a triptych. Its thrice copied form and reiterated greeting mimicked the habit of the parrot subject, and underscored a notion of a timeless cry of repeated greeting, incipient request for acknowledgment, emphatic enquiry, anyone-outthere assertion or wake-up call, in to infinity.

In 2009 during a six month residency at the FRAC Champagne-Ardennes, Reims that culminated in her exhibition Shadows Moons, Craven instigated the 16000 Mistakes project, where in the community building next door to the FRAC, local teenagers learned off-set screenprinting using Craven’s four iconic motifs – the Bird, Moon, Flower and Stripe. Craven collected all attempts, despite ‘mistakes’, accumulating a number around 16000. An ongoing project, first having been printed in black, Southard Reid’s Hello, Hello, Helloexhibition is the first showing of the Magenta Mistakes ; they entirely cover one of the long walls of the gallery, downstairs and upstairs, each a copy of one of the four motifs, each unique with its own accidents. Those not on the wall are exhibited in four stacks depending on their motif, on a pallet sent from the FRAC in Champagne, to which it and any further remaining prints – Craven invites visitors to take a Magenta Mistake each – will be returned at the end of the show, from where it can be exhibited/distributed again until they run out.

Hello, Hello, Hello as a triptych has been revisited, repeated, enlarged and shrunk for other shows, as is Craven’s practice. The 2002 original is currently on view at the Dairy Art Centre, London, supported by a large-scale wall painting made with bands of colour matched precisely to the Hellos palette, unfolding diagonally across the wall, in an interlocked continuum with and from the representational original. For Craven a counter-point and also integral element to the process of making work is the archival-like use of remaining paint when a work or series’ of works is completed, which she reconstitutes into painted Stripes or Bands of pure colour. Moving along canvases from right to left, Craven makes diagonal bands until all leftover paint is used up. The Stripes/Bands are therefore a recording, an echo in themselves of what has just passed. They are their own entity as a work or group of works’ but ever-tied to in the making of her paintings and containing that which they originated from – Craven refers to them as the paintings’ DNA.

In the summer of 2013 Craven returned to the Hello, Hello, Hellos, making a triptych and a four-part piece for the Southard Reid show, the latter work containing the addition of a Stripe of the same scale, conjoined with the three parrots. She preserved the paint used to make the new Hello works in a series of thirteenStripe paintings from which in turn the Dairy wall painting was matched.

Craven’s adoption of seriality melded with her diaristic approach has for many years been illustrated in the ongoing series’ of moons, as a subject its ever-present ever-changing identity providing a constant focal point from which to explore the passing of time in paint. Southard Reid’s Hello, Hello, Hello exhibition contains a set of six moons painted from life (as are all her 14 x 14 inch moons), during summer in Maine, at the same time as the 2013 Hello, Hello, Hellos and a pair of enlarged Moons in Magenta, a nod to the accompanying Mistakes. Painted simultaneously, one Magenta Moon is a mirrored version of the original other. The Sun Flower painting in the show, also painted as a pair, is exhibited solo – it will be echoed by its sister painting in Craven’s forthcoming solo show at Maccarone, NYC, opening November 8.

Ann Craven has exhibited widely in USA and Europe. Selected solo shows include Maccarone, NYC (forthcoming, 2011 and 2010), Ann Craven, Reims Moon at 39 Great Jones, New York, Ann Craven at Conduits, Re-map3, Athens, Greece, 2011, Shadows Moon, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne Reims, France, 2009, Against the Stream, The Sculpture Centre, NYC, Snoom, Delaware Centre for Contemporary Art, DE, 2008. Selected recent group shows include Souvenir curated by Lucie Fontaine, Galerie Perrotin, Paris,39GreatJones, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, 2013 and The Spirit Level, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 2012, both curated by Ugo Rondinone, Chaos as Usual, Bergen Kunsthall Norway, 2011. Ann Craven Penseé published by Karma International and Maccarone was published in 2013.

southardreid.com

Southard Reid, London
November 25, 2011 – January 28, 2012

Southard Reid is proud to present the exhibition Summer by New York based artist, Ann Craven.

Ann Cravenʼs subjects draw from a stable of generic popular imagery including birds, deer, cats, kittens, flowers and the moon, as well as paint itself, and her own practice of making work. She paints from life, from images in books, magazines, the internet, othersʼ paintings, mirror images of her own paintings, copies made an hour or day later. Utilising repetition, each work holds an individuality along with a sense of participation in a potentially infinite lifetime series.

Throughout her practice runs timeʼs persistent heartbeat. Craven describes her paintings as time-pieces – timeʼs passing necessitating the rendering of all experience as memory a little out of sync, the continuous just-past.

Craven conceived of Summer in the spring of this year and began painting the works throughout her summer in Maine. It is now well in to autumn and by the time her show closes in January, it will be deepest winter and summerʼs memory at its most distant. The material is that which illustrated her summertime – flowers, a tree, the moon – and those that peopled it, portraits of her family and friends that will be rotated throughout the show, like figures leaving and returning to a room.

The exhibition includes her other ubiquitous painting presences, paintings that are the actual palettes from which she works, their change of use signified at the point that she paints, in this case the silhouette of a bird, across the abstract surface. And her stripe paintings, completions to the act of finishing a representational work, where the leftover paint is automatically applied to another canvas in diagonal stripes of pure colour, sealing the memory of the painting that has gone before and the paint that made it – wasting nothing, and preparing for the next. This process is an unconscious act that Craven sometimes compares to breathing.

Summer presents as a diary, memories in paint. Like a summer album, the works are at once singular and universal, just as Cravenʼs painting fuses the conceptual, the painting of time, with the richly aesthetic, her expressive virtuosity of touch applied with sincerity to an ever-changing moon, flower, or face.

This is Ann Cravenʼs first solo show in London.

southardreid.com

39 GREAT JONES, New York
October – November, 2011

39 Great Jones is a project by Ugo Rondinone

39greatjones.com

CONDUITS (IT), ReMap3, Athens
September 12 – October 30, 2011
Conceptual Romantic with Irini Miga (two solo shows)

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REMAP is An International Contemporary Art Program
ReMap –firstly organised in 2007- is an international contemporary art platform that has become known for its participatory nature, hosting a unique mix of projects with current and up-and-coming -artists, curators, institutions and galleries- from across the world, all presented within the existing urban context accessible for free to its visitors. More than 700 artists from around the world have taken part in ReMap since its inception, many of whom have further presented their work in Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennale, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Zurich and more.

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remapkm.com

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki
March 11 – April 3, 2011

Galerie Forsblom is pleased to announce an exhibition by Ann Craven, her first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Ann Craven’s paintings seduce with their color, light and imagery. At the same time, Craven’s work addresses the many paradoxes that are intrinsic to a world that is saturated with images, and in which images become inseparable from reality. Her symbolic subjects, like birds and flowers, are often drawn from popular sources like field guides or nature books, sometimes painted from observation. The images in the paintings can be likened to actors in a play or an opera. They express human situations and feelings.

Craven’s use of repetition is an important element in her painting process. She expands her brushwork from painting to painting, creating variations in each repeated performance, raising complex questions with each variant about originality and meaning.

Included in the show are Craven’s “stripe” paintings. Using the extra paint on her palette after a painting is completed, these small canvases are keynotes for the entire exhibition and act as negatives to a positive – abstractions that prevent any simple reading of her paintings as representations.

Ann Craven lives and works in New York City. Her last solo exhibition Watercolors 2005-2010 was at Maccarone Gallery, New York. Her works can be found in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, both in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami Fl, and Henry Art Gallery, Faye G. Allen Center for the Visual Arts in Seattle.

galerieforsblom.com

Maccarone, New York
January 8 – February 12, 2011

“Craven’s prolific, serial output manifests here with an exploration of the artist’s accumulating watercolors from 2005-2010. Overlapping the subject matter of her oil paintings, their imagery includes flowers, cats, birds and owls – Craven’s menagerie. In contrast to the studied refinement of her oil painting, her watercolors emphasize an intuitive improvisational method yielding charged, haunting images. In each series, Craven’s brushwork records changes in her response to the subject as she moves from work to work. Craven utilizes the medium of watercolor as a laboratory of psychological exploration, producing works that speak through vibrant color and virtuosic execution.”

contemporaryartdaily.com

MACCARONE, New York
May 1 – June 26, 2010

When we see Craven’s paintings…we are picturing the repetition of language, vision, and painting. As a form reoccurs, it becomes more and more like a word — more like a symbol and a signal. *

Maccarone Gallery is pleased to present “Flowers”, an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Craven.

In previous work, Craven has explored symbolic images such as birds, deer, and the moon, pulled from thousands of her collected print outs, images she scanned and printed from nature books and magazines or gathered from the internet. In her first solo exhibition at Maccarone Gallery, the artist undertakes a new subject, still-life arrangements of white roses, painted from life. Painting with bravura improvisational intensity, and using primarily a palette of black and white, Craven reanimates the anachronistic genre of still-life flower-painting.

Craven began painting flowers from observation several years ago when, following the death of a loved one, she made paintings of the roses taken home from the funeral as gifts for her family. From the start, she approached the subject with a deep intuitive connection to both the historical and popular symbolism of the rose. The paintings in this exhibition build on this symbolism, immersing us in a dramatic black-and-white world of fluid scale, where rose petals become spiraling, almost galactic form, slashes of black paint, depicting rose leaves, become swift-moving vectors, and dashes of white, used to represent baby’s breath, suggest clusters of stars.

The exhibition is organized around three groups of paintings, each installed in a separate part of the gallery. The first room contains a series of nine paintings of bouquets of white roses in glass or crystal vases situated on a simple studio stool, all painted from observation. For the backgrounds, Craven uses flower motifs redeployed from her previous paintings, making these new paintings, in effect, flowers on flowers.

In the second room are “copies” of the paintings in the first room. The copies are mirror images of the “original” paintings, flipped left to right along their vertical axes. The copies are installed in clockwise rotation, also mirroring the counter-clockwise rotation of the paintings in the first room.

Around the street-facing perimeter wall of the gallery, Craven has installed her “stripe paintings” – that she makes using the paint left over on her palette after completing each painting. Craven considers these stripe paintings to be “born” from the flower paintings and refers to them as a third set of flowers.

Craven’s paintings — the originals, mirrored copies, and stripes — raise complex questions. What exactly occurs when Craven makes a mirrored copy, stroke for stroke, of an original, painted alla prima from a three-dimensional motif? The spontaneous, focused gesture is repeated and thus reified, an image of an object becomes a mirror image of an image. The improvisational brushstroke, usually considered a recording of a unique movement of a body in time, is re-performed, becoming choreographed. With the stripe paintings, representation and execution are still further reified. Left-over paint, applied in parallel brush strokes, becomes another sign for a bouquet of flowers.

With Craven’s acute departure from her previous iconography, she takes on a new language to communicate the deep psychological rigor it takes to re-paint paintings, brush stroke for brushstroke, color by color, line by line. As Craven stated in 2006, ” I often take the memory of the last painting and bring it into the next painting. The new painting becomes the memory of the moment just past.”

*Bianca Beck and Josh Brand, On Ann Craven, or Painting Again: Memory, Mirror, Moon, March, 2008.

maccarone.net

BLANCPAIN ART CONTEMPORAIN, Geneva
March 19 – May 8, 2010

Ann Craven’s flowers are her most daring work thus far. She has taken on the difficult task of painting bouquets of flowers — a fundamental symbol of sympathy and sentiment. Craven has completely drained the arrangements of color using a limited palette of black, white, yellow and grey. Although this gesture imbues the paintings with solemnity, they are not emptied of life. Craven’s vibrant improvisational brushwork infuses the paintings with an almost explosive sense of vitality.
Painting from life, Craven works fast. At this speed she is at her best, filtering an immense amount of detail and capturing it in a single brush stroke. She shows us the reflective surface of a vase or the cavernous center of a rose with a precise swoop of her hand.
In her previous iconic paintings of birds and deer, Craven’s subject matter was pulled from thousands of her collected printouts, images she scanned and printed from vintage books and magazines or gathered from the Internet. She is now painting directly from observation, taking on one of the most iconic of still life subjects — a bouquet of flowers. Several years ago, Craven started painting flowers privately, following the death of her mother, using the roses from the funeral as subject matter. She approached the motif of flowers with a sincere connection to their symbolic value. These recent flower paintings, here exhibited for the first time, leave the viewer with complex questions of life and mortality.

Les fleurs d’Ann Craven sont de loin son œuvre la plus audacieuse à ce jour. Elle a entrepris la tâche difficile de peindre des bouquets de fleurs – symbole fondamental de compassion et de sentiment. Ann Craven a entièrement épuisé ses arrangements de couleur en utilisant une palette limitée au noir, blanc, jaune et gris. Même si ce geste imprègne ses peintures de gravité, elles ne sont pas sans vie. L’improvisation vibrante du pinceau d’Ann Craven insuffle à la peinture un sens presque explosif de vitalité.
Peignant le réel, Craven travaille vite. A cette vitesse, elle atteint son meilleur, filtrant de nombreux détails, les capturant en un seul trait de pinceau. Elle met en valeur la surface réfléchissante d’un vase ou le centre caverneux d’une rose en un coup précis de la main.
Dans ses précédentes toiles emblématiques d’oiseaux et de cerfs, les sujets d’Ann Craven provenaient de sa collection d’innombrables impressions, soit d’images scannées ou copiées de vieux livres ou magazines, soit reprises d’Internet. Elle peint désormais directement par observation, utilisant l’un des sujets le plus représentatif de la nature morte – le bouquet de fleurs. Il y a plusieurs années, Ann Craven commença à peindre des fleurs pour elle-même à la suite du décès de sa mère, utilisant les fleurs de l’enterrement comme sujet. Elle s’attacha au motif de la fleur avec un réel lien à leur valeur symbolique. Ces récentes peintures de fleurs, présentées ici pour la première fois, laisse le spectateur face à des questions complexes touchant à la vie et à la mortalité.

blancpain-artcontemporain.ch

Press Release PDF

CONDUITS, Milan
October 1 – December 3, 2009

Conduits is proud to present a solo exhibition by Ann Craven

Working in the field of painting for more than a decade, Ann Craven exhibits on this occasion new paintings and watercolors, many of which are presented for the first time.

Greeting visitors will be four paintings entitled “Puff, Puff”. Seemingly identical, differentiated only through their brushwork, they depict exactly the same thing: a couple of birds, one of the major subjects through which Craven engages her characteristic idea of repetition. To describe this delicate oscillation between painterly beauty and the legacy of kitsch is the Swedish word “fulsnygg” (ugly-cute), a term that summarizes this complex topic in American culture, which is the basis and the starting point for Craven’s conception of polymorphous painterly proliferations.
Accompanying this strong presence within the space — which reminds us of an Operais — is a collection of watercolors featuring the artist’s cat and beloved friend Shadow. Never exhibited before, this series (conceived like a movie strip) shows again how important the idea of a continuum is within Craven’s production, a deep engagement that goes around and around between universal issues and personal affects.
Concluding the show, after this gracious Minuetto, is a diptych hung behind the corner, over the corridor that leads to the storage of the gallery, featuring one Stripe and a “Palette”, the two major series in which the artist structures her oeuvres. Conceived using the leftover paint from the four paintings that title the show, these small canvases, displayed in order to be seen properly only by children’s eyes, are sort of keynotes for the entire set: they speak about abstraction and the continuous readjustment of the medium of painting in a way that can really be defined as “expanded”.
Craven’s new type of “Palette”, displayed here for the first time representing a bird, probably a Phoenix, which will be consumed by the flames, and will be reborn out of the ashes, again (1) and again (2) and again (3) and again (4).
Ann Craven was born in Boston and lives between Harlem and Maine. Artists Amy Granat, Matt Keegan and Josh Smith have written about her work, which has been exhibited recently at CIAP in Hasselt, Belguim; the Sculpture Center in New York; Frac-Champagne-Ardenne in Reims France; and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington Virginia.
–Nicola Trezzi

 
Viale Stelvio, 66
20159 Milan IT

theconduits.com | flashartonline.com

CIAP –Association For Contemporary Art, Hasselt
September 5 – October 31, 2009

While Ann Craven is, fundamentally, a painter, her work unfolds within a conceptual framework which constantly reflects on the production, reproduction and distribution of images. As a painter she consciously situates her oeuvre on the divide between the ‘aura’ of uniqueness of the iconic image, as in traditional religious imagery, and the devaluation of images in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’ (W. Benjamin). Craven’s work incorporates the many paradoxes that are intrinsic to a world which is saturated with images to the point that these images become inseperable from reality. The grid of images through which nature is perceived is one of the main focal points of her work. Ann Craven paints traditional subjects like birds, flowers or deer, often refering to popular sources like field guides or greeting cards. These images might at one point have represented real emotions, but by reproducing them in even bolder colors on large canvases, the sweetness of the pictures is highlighted up to the point that they become perverse. By hanging various handpainted copies of one and the same painting side by side with large ‘Stripes paintings’ composed of oblique lines in the same colors, we are barred from an all too easy reading of these pictures as nothing more than appealing representations of nature. We are reminded that these paintings are – indeed – paintings, colored patterns on a flat surface, as well as cultural artifacts that mediate our perception.

Text: Peter Pollers

Site Gelatinefabriek
Armand Hertzstraat 21 bus 1
BE-3500 Hasselt, Belgium

ciap.be

GALERIE LHK, Paris
January 10 – February 28, 2009

Golden Swamp Warbler
For Ann Craven

Vermivora Chrysoptera is the scientific name of the marsh warbler with wings of gold. It is a small bird with a colorful beak, strong and truncated, whose flight is divided into successive twists, alternating flapping and slipping on the air, with wings closed. If all these details have little importance to us, to understand the work of Ann Craven, we need to know it has no interest in it either.

Ann Craven is a painter. She seeks the essence of the usual gestures of painting – but with a strong and sensitive paradoxical distance: her images are responsible for the most fragile of conscience of being but are also imbued with a serenity that is resolutely frivolous. She paints tirelessly, in vain to defy the “iconophagous” era that presently overwhelms us.
The color, the form and the substance, the respiration in the gesture, the internal time, the reverie – at the surface everything is distilled in a substance organized with birds, pandas or flowers, fifty orchids, four hundred moons repainted four hundred times. All these subjects represented, reproduced and repeated are above all objects of our attention. Ann Craven paints in the moonlight memories of the beloved. In a similar light she will share a prime ‘beer’ with friends amidst a painting of a ‘deer’. The benevolence of her thought is continuously rekindled in the repetitive present of her oblique lines, her stripes paintings, which she paints with the colors of ongoing works.
Ann might recall the secrets of a teenager from Reims who gave her the stack of bird cards she had collected in an ornithological magazine during her childhood spent podding romantic names such as “Warbler Marsh” and being fascinated by golden feathers she will probably never see. The mind’s eye often finds the most dazzling drives to leave the nest – in the images commitment to reality to describe the exact truth. Ann Craven paints the somewhere else of images – the thoughts. Ephemeral, stubborn, invasive, sometimes unfathomable, and flying they sometimes perch on the gesture of the hand as the Golden Swamp Warbler swings on a reed in the wind.

Golden Swamp Warbler
Pour Ann Craven

Vermivora Chrysoptera est le nom scientifique de la fauvette des marais à aile d’or. C’est un petit oiseau coloré au bec fort et tronqué, dont le vol se structure en rebondissements successifs, alternant le battement et le glissement sur l’air, les ailes fermées. Si tous ces détails ont peu d’importance pour nous, il faut savoir pour bien comprendre le travail d’Ann Craven, qu’ils n’ont aucun intérêt pour elle non plus.
Ann Craven est peintre. Elle cherche dans l’essence même des gestes habituels de la peinture l’accomplissement d’un acte fort et sensible mais paradoxalement distant de son sujet : ses images sont tout à la fois chargées de la plus fragile des consciences de l’être et empreintes d’une sérénité résolument futile. Elle peint sans relâche comme pour défier en vain l’ère iconophage qui nous submerge. La couleur, le fond et la forme, la respiration dans le geste, le temps intérieur, la rêverie, tout se condense à la surface, dans une matière qui s’organise en oiseaux, pandas ou fleurs, cinquante orchidées, quatre cents lunes, elles-mêmes recopiées quatre cents fois, autant de sujets représentés, reproduis et répétés dont chacun est avant tout un objet d’attention. Ann Craven peint le souvenir des êtres chers dans les lueurs de la lune. Elle peint l’envie légère et primordiale de partager une bière avec des amis dans la figure d’une biche. La bienveillance de sa pensée est sans cesse ravivée dans le présent répétitif de ses bandes obliques, ses stripes paintings, qu’elle peint avec les couleurs des autres travaux en cours. Elle ranime peut-être les secrets d’une adolescente de Reims qui lui avait confié ses « fiches oiseaux » de la revue ornithologique de son enfance toute proche où elle égrenait des noms romantiques comme « Fauvette des marais » et s’émerveillait des plumages dorés qu’elle ne verrait sans doute jamais. Souvent l’imaginaire trouve les ressorts les plus flamboyants de son envol dans l’attachement même des images à décrire le réel avec exactitude. Ann Craven peint l’ailleurs des images, les pensées, passagères, obstinées, envahissantes, indéchiffrables, volantes, qui parfois se perchent sur le geste de la main comme la Fauvette dorée des marais se pose sur le roseau pour se laisser balancer par le vent.

artslant.com

SCULPTURE CENTER, Queens
September 7 – November 30, 2008

SculptureCenter presents Ann Craven’s Against the Stream, 2008, the next installment in an ongoing artist dialog inscribed on SculptureCenter’s main gate. The work will be on view September 7 – November 30, 2008 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 7, 4-6pm. Taking place on the corrugated metal of SculptureCenter’s façade door, this series of gate works was conceived in 2007 for The Happiness of Objects exhibition with an inaugural work by Olivier Mosset titled Golden Shower, 2007.
This year, SculptureCenter has the pleasure to continue the gate series with Ann Craven’s Against the Stream, 2008. Taking its title from a 1946 novel by Barbara Cartland, the work responds in part to the stripes of Mosset’s Golden Shower, while further exploring the possibilities of scale and the language of visual abstraction.
Ann Craven is a painter based in New York. She is widely recognized for her small and largescale paintings of bird-and-branch motifs along with her paintings of the stages of the moon – which were completed almost entirely on the roof of her Harlem, New York studio. In 2005 Craven moved a step further into abstraction, taking with her the palette used in her figurative work and sparking her current painterly investigations into a non-objective relation to color. With the use of diagonal stripes, Craven emphasizes the location where stripes meet and highlights the points where colors collide. The version now depicted on SculptureCenter’s gate is the third incarnation of the color palette used in Against the Stream and Craven’s largest painting to date. For the gate version, Craven has blown up an 18 by 24 inch striped canvas first inspired by a five by five foot painting from her 2007 moon series, thus demonstrating her movement from figurative to abstraction in her investigations of color.
Ann Craven has had solo exhibitions at the Fond Régional d’Art Contemporain de Champagne- Ardenne (Champagne-Ardenne, France, 2008); Knoedler & Company (New York, 2008); Galerie Catherine Bastide (Brussels, 2006) and Klemins Gasser + Tanja Grunert, Inc. (New York, 2006). Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including What we Do Is Secret at BLANCPAIN ART CONTEMPORAIN (Geneva, 2007); Cluster at Participant Inc. (New York, 2006); CarreRond in Paris at Centre Cultural Suisse (Paris, 2006); and with Cinema Zero in An Evening with Cinema Zero: Ann Craven collaboration with Amy Granat and Dusty Santos, (New York, 2006), and at the New Museum (New York, 2004).
sculpture-center.org

DCCA DELAWARE CENTER FOR THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Wilmington
2008

www.decontemporary.org

FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims
June 26 – September 21, 2008

“Ann Craven is fundamentally a painter. She paints the moon. Sometimes birds, flowers, deers or diagonal colored bands. She painted 400 moons, not as an ephemeris, but as if the pale light of the eternal face summoned the distant or missing loved ones, in a nocturnal reverie where the brush plays master of the ceremonies. The works silently carry that emotional weight. Then the artist copies those same moons, to challenge a persistent painting demand that always wants to produce an original. This stubbornly repetitive work is imbued with great spiritual inwardness, a way of harmonizing the mind, the body and the breath, with a rigorous practice where painting becomes a strong tense in life’s physiological rhythm. She paints obsolete subjects as she knows the symbolic power of the images that accompany us, even the most insignificant ones: images without content kept by our grandmothers, for no real reason, the good grades the schoolboy proudly pins in his room… Her bird or flower series endlessly conjugate painting’s essential relationship between figure and ground, the vibration of dazzling colors that are all signs of time. As one color is applied Craven draws a diagonal line on a canvas. Nothing is lost, everything “is made painting” and all paintings are of equal importance to her eyes, be it a copy, an original, color palette, abstract bands or birds on a branch.”

François Quintin, « Une pensée pour Ann », in Ann Craven, Shadows Moon And Abstract Lies. Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Reims. JRP Ringier édition, Zurich 2009

Vernissage Thursday June 26, 6-10pm
‘Moon Shadow Part. 1’ a film by Amy Granat and Ann Craven – Screened in 16mm: 9PM, 10PM, 10:15, 10:30

1 Place Museux
Reims 51100
France

frac-champagneardenne.org

Knoedler & Co, New York
March 13 – April 26, 2008
PART II (2nd HANG)

The following essay was written for my friend Ann Craven. I tend to write how I talk. I do this because I am afraid that if I write any other way it would be fake. I hope that my sense of humor comes across in this little statement. I really do care about Ann.
—Josh Smith, January 2008

Ann Craven’s paintings are all different. When you get to look at one you feel lucky. If you put one of her paintings on the wall it just looks good. Whether you want something tough or something sweet, one of Ann’s paintings fills the void. When you see Ann Craven’s art somewhere, it really works to separate itself from everything around it. It exists in its own time. The paintings themselves are beautiful objects. Each one looks as if it has always existed . . . like caring hands have moved it from wall to wall over a period of time. This gives the work a warm weight. It is hard for me to say whether I like this type of work, but I then start to realize that Ann’s work is never “this type of work.” It is always its own thing. Ann’s art opens my eyes to other things in the world, which I might otherwise not have thought anything of. Her art is straightforward. She is always trying to portray it as having some sort of conceptual meaning, and it does . . . but not in the way she thinks. The conceptual aspect of Ann’s painting lies in the straightforward and driving process and style in which she works. She’s a very hard-working person. Often she sets out to do impossible things. But no matter what she does, its absolute quality prevails.
Ann’s work is capable of entering our consciousness at many different points. It can, at the same time, be both a cold symbol of modern times and the straightforward presentation of its subject. In one context, Ann’s work can be seen as colorful decoration; in another, the same painting becomes a biting comment on the state of things. Critics of Ann Craven’s work say it lacks the “cool factor.” All that means is that Ann gets to continue producing her work unfettered. She has managed to push hard through the challenges of being a great artist.
The birds look good. They serve as a perfect vehicle for color and expression. They are sometimes perceived as silly. A big painting of a bird is silly, but once you get over that initial stage of perception, things begin to change within the paintings. The scale and the alloverness of them stand out for me; also, the straightforward and casual assuredness with which the paintings are executed. A lot of the birds are somewhat sinister and dark. The moons are dark, but they are not so sinister. Ann painted these numerous times, in numbers ranging from one into the hundreds. I sometimes think she overdid it a little with the moons. But to really appreciate them one needs to see just one or two on a wall . . . or four or five. These paintings are just black squares—I think 12 or 14 inches square. Near the middle of each painting there is a white circle or a dash with some haze. It is a quick impression of the moon. To make these paintings, Ann actually goes out and paints the moon at night. This may sound romantic or glamorous, but it’s actually not. She always seems really nervous and agitated when she paints the moon. She is afraid the moon is going to go away before she can get it. Of course it’s going away; but it comes back. She also paints them large now—I think 4 feet square. The large moons come off differently—they are less immediate, but softer as well. Some of this softness appears to come from the larger brushstrokes. Ann’s way of scaling up her moon paintings is just to use a bigger brush on a bigger canvas.
Ann produces great paintings, one after another. She can make a painting from nothing. She does not take breaks to reflect on things. Ann manages to walk a line between writing a tell-all book and remaining completely detached. One common thread, which runs through Ann’s subjects, is a lack of specificity. Her subjects are all rather generic. Leaden metaphorical meanings and definitive portraits tend to be avoided. Ann Craven mostly limits herself to animals, moons, trees, stripes, and so forth. Currently, moons and birds are probably the most prevalent.
The problem with most representational art is that it is so sure of itself. What gives a subject so much importance that it warrants an artistic rendering? Often representational painters completely misunderstand the whole idea of art. They think art is about doing things competently with just a touch of panache. That is indeed one kind of art, but not a very interesting kind. Great representational art looks right through its subject. The subject serves as a vehicle for an expression or idea, not a crutch or publicity gimmick. Ann Craven’s work does not go around to openings with a limp and a cigarette between its lips. Playing games is not an option in her paintings. These paintings just come in and get the job done.
Because Ann Craven sets the bar very high for herself, she usually waits until close to the last minute to start working on something. She is always thinking of the context of her work. Perhaps she need not think so much about this, because often context is hard to control.
Ann seems in a way, unsatisfied with everything she does. That’s why she keeps working away constantly. The birds and the moons are both simple ideas. Is not the challenge to make something as simple and successful as possible? When it comes to painting, it is best to sneak all of the meaning in through the back door. Ann does not burden the viewer with issues or problems. The issues and problems are there, only they are disguised as the moon, a deer, a bird.
Ann takes tried and true ideas and portrays them honestly, as if she herself invented them. When she paints a bird, she does so as if she were the first person to ever paint a bird. She dashes forward with a firm innocence. Her skill as an artist is greatly enhanced by that innocence. She takes everything so seriously—that bothers me, and sometimes I hate her.

Josh Smith is an artist, who currently exhibits at Luhring Augustine Gallery. He lives and works in New York City.

This essay will appear in these publications:
Ann Craven Moon Birds Published by: Knoedler & Company, March 13 – April 26, 2008
and
Ann Craven: Shadows Moon and Abstract Lies, Le Frac Champagne Ardenne, Published by JRP/RINGIER Published with Le Frac Champagne Ardenne, catalogue Summer 2008

villagevoice.com

Knoedler & Co, New York
March 13 – April 26, 2008
PART I (1st HANG)

The following essay was written for my friend Ann Craven. I tend to write how I talk. I do this because I am afraid that if I write any other way it would be fake. I hope that my sense of humor comes across in this little statement. I really do care about Ann.
—Josh Smith, January 2008

Ann Craven’s paintings are all different. When you get to look at one you feel lucky. If you put one of her paintings on the wall it just looks good. Whether you want something tough or something sweet, one of Ann’s paintings fills the void. When you see Ann Craven’s art somewhere, it really works to separate itself from everything around it. It exists in its own time. The paintings themselves are beautiful objects. Each one looks as if it has always existed . . . like caring hands have moved it from wall to wall over a period of time. This gives the work a warm weight. It is hard for me to say whether I like this type of work, but I then start to realize that Ann’s work is never “this type of work.” It is always its own thing. Ann’s art opens my eyes to other things in the world, which I might otherwise not have thought anything of. Her art is straightforward. She is always trying to portray it as having some sort of conceptual meaning, and it does . . . but not in the way she thinks. The conceptual aspect of Ann’s painting lies in the straightforward and driving process and style in which she works. She’s a very hard-working person. Often she sets out to do impossible things. But no matter what she does, its absolute quality prevails.
Ann’s work is capable of entering our consciousness at many different points. It can, at the same time, be both a cold symbol of modern times and the straightforward presentation of its subject. In one context, Ann’s work can be seen as colorful decoration; in another, the same painting becomes a biting comment on the state of things. Critics of Ann Craven’s work say it lacks the “cool factor.” All that means is that Ann gets to continue producing her work unfettered. She has managed to push hard through the challenges of being a great artist.
The birds look good. They serve as a perfect vehicle for color and expression. They are sometimes perceived as silly. A big painting of a bird is silly, but once you get over that initial stage of perception, things begin to change within the paintings. The scale and the alloverness of them stand out for me; also, the straightforward and casual assuredness with which the paintings are executed. A lot of the birds are somewhat sinister and dark. The moons are dark, but they are not so sinister. Ann painted these numerous times, in numbers ranging from one into the hundreds. I sometimes think she overdid it a little with the moons. But to really appreciate them one needs to see just one or two on a wall . . . or four or five. These paintings are just black squares—I think 12 or 14 inches square. Near the middle of each painting there is a white circle or a dash with some haze. It is a quick impression of the moon. To make these paintings, Ann actually goes out and paints the moon at night. This may sound romantic or glamorous, but it’s actually not. She always seems really nervous and agitated when she paints the moon. She is afraid the moon is going to go away before she can get it. Of course it’s going away; but it comes back. She also paints them large now—I think 4 feet square. The large moons come off differently—they are less immediate, but softer as well. Some of this softness appears to come from the larger brushstrokes. Ann’s way of scaling up her moon paintings is just to use a bigger brush on a bigger canvas.
Ann produces great paintings, one after another. She can make a painting from nothing. She does not take breaks to reflect on things. Ann manages to walk a line between writing a tell-all book and remaining completely detached. One common thread, which runs through Ann’s subjects, is a lack of specificity. Her subjects are all rather generic. Leaden metaphorical meanings and definitive portraits tend to be avoided. Ann Craven mostly limits herself to animals, moons, trees, stripes, and so forth. Currently, moons and birds are probably the most prevalent.
The problem with most representational art is that it is so sure of itself. What gives a subject so much importance that it warrants an artistic rendering? Often representational painters completely misunderstand the whole idea of art. They think art is about doing things competently with just a touch of panache. That is indeed one kind of art, but not a very interesting kind. Great representational art looks right through its subject. The subject serves as a vehicle for an expression or idea, not a crutch or publicity gimmick. Ann Craven’s work does not go around to openings with a limp and a cigarette between its lips. Playing games is not an option in her paintings. These paintings just come in and get the job done.
Because Ann Craven sets the bar very high for herself, she usually waits until close to the last minute to start working on something. She is always thinking of the context of her work. Perhaps she need not think so much about this, because often context is hard to control.
Ann seems in a way, unsatisfied with everything she does. That’s why she keeps working away constantly. The birds and the moons are both simple ideas. Is not the challenge to make something as simple and successful as possible? When it comes to painting, it is best to sneak all of the meaning in through the back door. Ann does not burden the viewer with issues or problems. The issues and problems are there, only they are disguised as the moon, a deer, a bird.
Ann takes tried and true ideas and portrays them honestly, as if she herself invented them. When she paints a bird, she does so as if she were the first person to ever paint a bird. She dashes forward with a firm innocence. Her skill as an artist is greatly enhanced by that innocence. She takes everything so seriously—that bothers me, and sometimes I hate her.

Josh Smith is an artist, who currently exhibits at Luhring Augustine Gallery. He lives and works in New York City.

This essay will appear in these publications:
Ann Craven Moon Birds Published by: Knoedler & Company, March 13 – April 26, 2008
and
Ann Craven: Shadows Moon and Abstract Lies, Le Frac Champagne Ardenne, Published by JRP/RINGIER Published with Le Frac Champagne Ardenne, catalogue Summer 2008

villagevoice.com

Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago
February 16 – March 15, 2008

Exhibiting the Stripe Paintings created from the unused paint of the Bird paintings in the Exhibition: Moon Birds at Knoedler & Co happening simultaneously 

Opening reception: Saturday, February 16, 2008 6-8pm

shanecampbellgallery.com

Zach Feuer Gallery
July 10 – August 24, 2007

Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of new paintings by New York based artists Joe Bradley, Ann Craven, Dana Frankfort, and Keith Mayerson.
Bradley’s bright canvas panels take Minimalist references and create imposing installations of color and scale, while his casual application of paint forgoes ideas of pictorial illusion. Rather than use the monumental size to suggest a certain grandeur, his paintings make reveal an utterly human, necessarily imperfect quality, which is magnified in his version of figuration. Craven adeptly uses repetition in her serial paintings, which depict familiar imagery often culled from commercial sources, revealing a reinterpretation of the painter’s traditional aims of singularity and original composition. She adopts these images of nature from generic representation, in place of the outside world, aware that both have become equally familiar to her viewer. Frankfort’s paintings use text and, more recently, symbols to challenge ideas of reading and communication. Obscuring the text as image with brushwork and disorienting color, Frankfort blocks the viewer’s facility of interpretation and forges a new relationship between language and audience. Mayerson’s lushly painted portraits based on familiar media imagery reduce the iconic to the intimate, and are exhibited in deliberate sequences that suggest larger narrative themes. In the group of paintings for this exhibition, he concentrates on the power of iconic images to portray human agency, spirit, and transcendence in times of crisis and war.

530 W. 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

zachfeuer.com

Mandrake Bar
2692 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034

Opening July 6, 2007

performance by Felicia Ballos & Flora Wiegman on July 18, 8pm

mandrakebar.com

Non-Art-Collections from Artists and Curators
HEIDELBERGER KUNSTVEREIN, Heidelberg, Germany
June 29 – September 9, 2007
curated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers

hdkv.de

BLANCPAIN ART CONTEMPORAIN
Geneva, Switzerland
Curated by Amy O’Neill
May 25 – June 30, 2007

blancpain-artcontemporain.ch

On The Collective for Living Cinema
Organized by Orchard in association with Anthology Film Archives

Dates: April 1– 29, 2007, Thurs-Sun, 1-6 pm

In 1973 a group of film students from the Harpur College Cinema Department looking to create a contemporary and fertile context for their work found The Collective for Living Cinema, an artist-run cooperative that would serve both as an exhibition venue and a center for production and discourse. Above the first program note was a miniature manifesto stating their intention to “overcome the economic, social and political burdens of an art in chains.” Lasting for 19 years, The Collective came to embody the under-defined moment between the canonized generation of “the essential cinema” and the transfiguration of film as “new media” embraced by the institutional hierarchy of the art world and subject to the theoretical, critical and economic tidal forces therein. Run as a multi-disciplinary venue, The Collective continuously engaged in a recovery of the recent past, championing the marginal and positing alternative film histories. The screening room was seen as a workshop in which this culture became immersed in its own brand of cinematic delirium. Annette Michelson pointed out that The Collective “attempted to break down distinctions between industrial film and avant guard film, between films that form part of a classical canon and those which are on the margins or periphery of canonical taste.” By “maintaining and constantly questioning an exploratory attitude rather than by embalming predigested classical canon”, Michelson stated, The Collective emerged in the 1980’s as the “liveliest” New York film venue of it’s time.

This exhibition will re-examine the Collective’s history and parallel it’s mission within the current set of “economic, social and political chains.” It has been organized as a series of individually programmed screening events at ORCHARD (April 6-8 to be held at Anthology Film Archive), a timeline of documentation and an installation specific to the ambivalent capacity of cinema to enter the gallery through production / distribution on video.

Screenings and Event Schedule at Orchard:

…

Thursday April 19, 8PM
Orchids for Orchard
Program organized by Amy Granat
Cats, flowers,(a little touch of wild)…some sounds..almost hallways..
Pola Chapelle: How To Draw A Cat
A short film by Cinema Zero (with sound piece by Richard Aldrich)
Brian Wilson “Untitled”
Direct Art Product: Robot Movie
Performance Jutta Koether
Installation contribution by Ann Craven

…

orchard47.org

CAC – Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati
November 17, 2006 – January 14, 2007
organized by Public-Holiday Projects, Los Angeles/New York, and CAC–Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH

Bunch Alliance and Dissolve investigates the structural potentialities of a group exhibition, and the temporal nature of correlations that are drawn by third parties between artists’ works. The show includes approximately twenty-five international artists. While a number of the participating artists have exhibited extensively, the majority are early-career artists, for whom this will be their first museum exhibition.

Ann Craven 
“Moons (400 Copies), 2006”
2006 
400 Canvases, 14×14” each canvas
Oil on Canvas
©Tony Walsh, courtesy Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

contemporaryartscenter.org

KLEMENS GASSER & TANJA GRUNERT, INC., New York
November 13 – December 21, 2006

400 Moon Paintings

gassergrunert.net
timeout.com

KLEMENS GASSER & TANJA GRUNERT, INC., New York
June 20 – July 28, 2006

Deer Paintings

gassergrunert.net

GALERIE CATHERINE BASTIDE, Brussels
June 2 – July 15, 2006

catherinebastide.com

ANGSTROM GALLERY, Dallas
April 16 – May 21 2005

angstromgallery.com

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.

thehort.org

MARC SELWYN FINE ART, Los Angeles
October – November 2004

marcselwynfineart.com

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.

paolocurti.com

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

artcritical.com

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

ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY, Boston
September 5 – 28, 2002

allstonskirt.com

KLEMENS GASSER & TANJA GRUNERT INC., New York
September 4 – October 5, 2002

nytimes.com
frieze.com
nyartsmagazine.com

LAUREN WITTELS, New York
1995