Sarah Crowner’s The Sea, the Sky, a Window is a glowing example of the artist’s visual theater. As soon as you enter the Hill Art Foundation, Crowner’s painting Rotated two-way Arabesque (2015) greets you like a flashing arrow, or a good usher, directing your gaze directly down the hall, where a sculpture by Cy Twombly is framed against an expansive field of blues. When your body catches up, your eyes will freely wander across multiple Twombly works, immersed in the environment created by Crowner’s new suite of paintings The Sea, the Sky, a Window 1, 2, and 3 (all 2023). Though the paintings are hung on separate, stand-alone walls—punctuated by views of auto shops, art galleries, various other businesses, and the architecture of the High Line—they also function as a single, monumental landscape. The careful seaming of modulated color panels throughout, and the purposeful alignments of bare canvas at each work’s top, produce an epic horizon line against which the artist’s midnight, cobalt, and cerulean forms coalesce and flow across the city vistas.
Crowner’s paintings also unapologetically present themselves as backdrops for Twombly’s artworks, like a playful inversion of Barnett Newman’s mid-century dictum that “sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.” Her turning of the sculpture-painting relationship into an actor-setting relationship is informed by her career-long explorations of the proscenium stage: ranging from interactive sets for experimental theater productions to art exhibitions built with the stage as their inspiration, as well as costumes and sets designed for contemporary ballets. 1 Certain Twombly sculptures, like Untitled (1997) and Untitled (2009), invite you to see them in the round, activated at every turn by Crowner’s gradating colors, while others, such as Madame d’O (1999), behave like good dancers, with a self-possessed frontality that stops you in your tracks.
In this gallery, you might be reminded of the mysterious archaeological space of Twombly’s studio, captured in numerous photo studies by the artist himself, where sculptures and fragments, bathed in white, take shape against the agitated cyan seas of his history paintings. But there’s also a sense of the young Twombly as captured by his friend Robert Rauschenberg, standing dutifully beside his early sculptures like a director introducing a troupe of performers. As with her own artwork, so with others: Crowner tends to prize open spaces and timelines so you can pause between inside and outside, or between early and late.
Each space in the Hill Art Foundation is animated by these patterns, led in part by Crowner’s study of the Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa. There are vistas where complex three-dimensional objects turn into striking two-dimensional shapes, and then back again. There are formal juxtapositions that patiently relish the inherent materiality of each artwork. And there are mini-theaters filled with narrative tensions and historical connections. Among Scarpa’s contributions to mid-century exhibition design, and one of Crowner’s main inspirations for this project, was his renovation of Sicily’s Palazzo Abatellis in the mid-1950s, following its destruction in World War II. In a room featuring alabaster busts by the medieval sculptor Francesco Laurana, Scarpa introduced handcarved wooden bases and tonal backdrops of blue and green to bring out the vibrancy of the sculptural material and the subtle work of the artist’s hand. “Scarpa’s work,” Crowner explains, “is really painterly. To choose such strong colors to frame sculpture is a gesture that emphasizes the silhouettes better than a white wall ever could. I’m searching for the right blues so you won’t lose any line, any wiggle, any edge.” Such close attention to Twombly’s line also doubles back, heightening Crowner’s haptic sense of refinement in her own work.
I. Stage Set
Sarah Crowner’s The Sea, the Sky, a Window is a glowing example of the artist’s visual theater. As soon as you enter the Hill Art Foundation, Crowner’s painting Rotated two-way Arabesque (2015) greets you like a flashing arrow, or a good usher, directing your gaze directly down the hall, where a sculpture by Cy Twombly is framed against an expansive field of blues. When your body catches up, your eyes will freely wander across multiple Twombly works, immersed in the environment created by Crowner’s new suite of paintings The Sea, the Sky, a Window 1, 2, and 3 (all 2023). Though the paintings are hung on separate, stand-alone walls—punctuated by views of auto shops, art galleries, various other businesses, and the architecture of the High Line—they also function as a single, monumental landscape. The careful seaming of modulated color panels throughout, and the purposeful alignments of bare canvas at each work’s top, produce an epic horizon line against which the artist’s midnight, cobalt, and cerulean forms coalesce and flow across the city vistas.
Crowner’s paintings also unapologetically present themselves as backdrops for Twombly’s artworks, like a playful inversion of Barnett Newman’s mid-century dictum that “sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.” Her turning of the sculpture-painting relationship into an actor-setting relationship is informed by her career-long explorations of the proscenium stage: ranging from interactive sets for experimental theater productions to art exhibitions built with the stage as their inspiration, as well as costumes and sets designed for contemporary ballets. 1 Certain Twombly sculptures, like Untitled (1997) and Untitled (2009), invite you to see them in the round, activated at every turn by Crowner’s gradating colors, while others, such as Madame d’O (1999), behave like good dancers, with a self-possessed frontality that stops you in your tracks.
In this gallery, you might be reminded of the mysterious archaeological space of Twombly’s studio, captured in numerous photo studies by the artist himself, where sculptures and fragments, bathed in white, take shape against the agitated cyan seas of his history paintings. But there’s also a sense of the young Twombly as captured by his friend Robert Rauschenberg, standing dutifully beside his early sculptures like a director introducing a troupe of performers. As with her own artwork, so with others: Crowner tends to prize open spaces and timelines so you can pause between inside and outside, or between early and late.
Each space in the Hill Art Foundation is animated by these patterns, led in part by Crowner’s study of the Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa. There are vistas where complex three-dimensional objects turn into striking two-dimensional shapes, and then back again. There are formal juxtapositions that patiently relish the inherent materiality of each artwork. And there are mini-theaters filled with narrative tensions and historical connections. Among Scarpa’s contributions to mid-century exhibition design, and one of Crowner’s main inspirations for this project, was his renovation of Sicily’s Palazzo Abatellis in the mid-1950s, following its destruction in World War II. In a room featuring alabaster busts by the medieval sculptor Francesco Laurana, Scarpa introduced handcarved wooden bases and tonal backdrops of blue and green to bring out the vibrancy of the sculptural material and the subtle work of the artist’s hand. “Scarpa’s work,” Crowner explains, “is really painterly. To choose such strong colors to frame sculpture is a gesture that emphasizes the silhouettes better than a white wall ever could. I’m searching for the right blues so you won’t lose any line, any wiggle, any edge.” Such close attention to Twombly’s line also doubles back, heightening Crowner’s haptic sense of refinement in her own work.
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