Ann Craven: Pensée #59

Parapet Real Humans is pleased to announce 

Ann Craven: Pensée #59

January 23-February 8, 2020

Artist Talk: Thursday January 23, 2020 at 1PM

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.

Artist talk will take place on Thursday January 23, 2020 at 1pm.

Parapet Real Humans

2901 Sidney Street
Saint Louis, MO 63104

Ann Craven April 13 - May 30, 2017

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 in here 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 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.

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