Shadows Moon and Abstract Lies

First monograph

Ann Craven’s work can be situated alongside the thinking of a number of other American artists today, such as Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, or Josh Smith. They work with the potential of surface, and incorporate not only the saturation of the contemporary world with images, but also the mistakes or accidents that infinite production unavoidably generates. Her work derives from a deep and spiritual interiority; it is a means of attuning her thinking, her body, her breathing, even, to pictorial practice with almost obsessive rigor. Thus, while her work itself is formally distinctive, Ann Craven acknowledges the influence of artists such as Vija Celmins, Allan McCollum, and even Agnes Martin, whose standards for precision in artistic practice are inseparable from the physiological rhythms of their lives.

Ann Craven is, fundamentally, a painter. She paints the moon, birds, flowers, deer, or color stripes. She paints antiquated subjects, for she knows the symbolic power of the images accompanying us, even the most insignificant ones—those empty of content that our grandmothers would keep for no veritable reason, or the gold stars that a schoolgirl or boy pins up in their room with such pride. Her birds and flowers series endlessly interpret the essential painterly relationship between background and form, and the vibration of dazzling colors as so many signs of the times. Therefore everything is “painting,” and all painting is equal in her eyes, whether copy or original, background color, abstract band, or bird on a branch.

Published with FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.