ATHENS.- Gagosian announces Night for Day, an exhibition of new works by Sarah Crowner. On view at the Athens gallery, the exhibition features new paintings and an immersive, site-specific tile installation.
A brilliant yellow hue permeates the gallery’s ground-floor spaces, emanating from a plane of handmade glazed tiles spanning in all directions. Laid in an expansive chevron pattern and set atop a raised wooden platform as if a theatrical stage, Platform (Yellow terra cotta) (2024) is immediately visible from the gallery’s entrance: visitors step onto a bright, earthen surface and into a chromatic environment that replicates the color temperature of the intense Hellenic heat, capturing daylight as one might enter the color field of an abstract painting.
In the upstairs rooms, sewn paintings composed of interlocking curvilinear shapes hang in contrast to the hard heat below. Deep greens and rich blues saturate soft surfaces and recall illuminated foliage of dense gardens or forests at night. Inverting the title of François Truffaut’s 1973 film Day for Night, which was named after the filmmaking technique in which outdoor sequences are filmed in daylight and filtered to appear as if at night, Crowner subtly catalyzes a sequence of light to dark and back again as one travels between gallery floors—a sensory palette that evolves as much between tangible forms as with shifts in natural light throughout the day.
Crowner’s architectural interventions, which occupy interior as well as outdoor walls, ceilings, and floors, invite reciprocal explorations of the body’s relationship to painting that are both active and passive, observable and intangible, tactile and ephemeral. In dialogue with the history of painting and its possibilities in the present, she imagines other forms that the medium can take. The various media and disciplines that comprise her unique practice are rooted in the fundamental elements of form, color, and gesture inherent to traditional painting, as well as a preoccupation with space and light, which extends across all of her work.
A performance inspired by Crowner’s work, composed by Apostolis Koutsogiannis of Athens’s Oros Ensemble, will take place within the installation during the opening beginning at sunset. Koutsogiannis’s new score investigates the way sound masses can reverberate through space, just as light filters through open windows and reflects off the tiles’ surfaces. Crowner’s dynamic history of dance and musical collaborations within her own installations, including those at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, respectively, and her stage and costume design for American Ballet Theatre, underscore her unique approach to painting that engages myriad art forms in three-dimensional space.
Sarah Crowner was born in Philadelphia in 1974 and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Contemporary Austin, Texas; Dallas Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Exhibitions and installations include Beetle in the Leaves, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016–17); Platform (Blue Green Terracotta for JC), Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2022–24); Serpentear, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2022–23); Blues in Greens | Greens in Blues, Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro and Auroras, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); Around Orange, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2023–24); and The Sea, the Sky, a Window, Hill Art Foundation, New York (2023–24). Upcoming in 2025, solo projects by Crowner will be mounted at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, and Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia.
