PARIS.- Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, is presenting Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze, a solo exhibition by Sarah Crowner, uniting a new series of embroideries, bronze sculptures and canvases. This is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, and her first presentation in Paris.
Sarah Crowner is renowned for her investigations into colour, materiality and form. Her works, which span painting, sculpture, collage, tile installations and set design, invite a close engagement with the viewer. Subverting expectations of structure, texture and palette, they elicit new ways of slow and deliberate looking. For this exhibition, Crowner foregrounds abstract colour fields and juxtaposes hard and soft, reflective and absorbent, surfaces.
Five wool embroidered works from 2025 mark a new development in the artist’s practice. At first glance, they appear to be monochromatic canvases, each composed from a vibrating expanse of colour. Contemplated up close, however, they reveal themselves to be handmade objects, created stitch-by-stitch in snaking tendrils, from a varied range of hues. This subtle yet integral plurality is reflected in the titles of the works: Reds, Oranges, Blacks and Blues, Violets, and Whites. Under the changing, dappled light, one almost perceives the individual threads of wool as impasto brushstrokes, which take partial inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, 1889, as well as his paintings made in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The textured palette and swirling intensity of his canvases can be traced in the eddying surfaces of Crowner’s embroideries.
Collaboration plays a central role in Crowner’s practice. For the new ‘Tableaux en Laine’, she worked closely with a group of more than twenty embroiderers, based in Maine, USA. Ranging from school age to septuagenarians, they worked together to meticulously stitch each composition by hand over many days, based on ‘stitch map’ drawings created by the artist. These ‘maps’ are used as directional guides to translate colour and line into physical objects and ground the works within a formal painterly language. ‘It always goes back to painting’, the artist states.
While making her recent embroideries, Crowner was looking closely at the work of Richard Serra, from his early steel slabs to his black, monochrome drawings. Ostensibly simple, the drawings reveal what Crowner describes as ‘this heavy working, made gesture by gesture’ from thick oil sticks. Similarly, despite first appearances, his weighty and dense sculptures are speckled with patina, embedding within them a sense of passing time. Whether cast, stitched or sewn, this inherent slipperiness between expectation, perception and reality lies at the heart of Crowner’s practice.
In response to the wool paintings, Crowner’s ‘Pierres en Bronze’ sculptures are displayed almost as if they are onlookers, their highly polished surfaces reflecting spills and splashes of colour from the lush wool works. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, the bronze surfaces activate, generating new abstractions which are constantly in flux. Hard, heavy and solid, the sculptures are simultaneously ephemeral, as light, time and transience permeate their shifting surfaces. These Stone sculptures, as their titles insinuate, are based on small stones that Crowner has collected over the years from Rincon Beach in California, near where she grew up. With their natural holes and pockmarks, the stones resemble small Modernist sculptures, transformed here from their once matte and lightweight forms into enlarged and shiny bronzes.
In her sewn canvases, Crowner melds order and spontaneity. Working according to a process she describes as ‘slow, fast, slow, fast, instinctual versus methodical’, she draws inspiration from elements of nature as much as art history. In Skyline (Blues) and Seafloor (Greens), both 2025, the shapes echo one another, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of déjà vu. First, the paintings appear as familiar fields of drawn lines, forms and colours; it is only from up close that one sees their inherent structure: cut fragments carefully sutured to form a greater whole.
Emphasising the act of transformation in her work, Crowner’s hard sculptures, soft textured embroideries, and cut and sewn canvases each encapsulate something of their opposite, encouraging the viewer to contemplate the yin-yang dualities of the everyday.
Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions including SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2025); The Chinati Foundation, Marfa (2022–2024); Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (both 2023–2024); Auroras and Casa de Vidro, Instituto Bardi, São Paulo (2023); Museo Amparo, Puebla (2022–2023); KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville (2018–2019); and MASS MoCA, North Adams (2016–2017). Crowner’s works are in the collections of major international institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; The Contemporary Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.
