Ann Craven
"Horses (Like a Melody, on Pink, with Orchids & Hollyhocks, August 12, 2020)", 2020
Watercolor on Arches paper
15 x 11 inches (38.1 x 28 cm)
Courtesy of the Artist and Karma

Selected by Olivia Shao

nn Craven (b. 1967, Boston) makes self-reflexive paintings that comment on devotion, loss, and the immortalizing nature of her medium. Primarily using unabashedly high-key colors, she paints and repaints her key subjects—winsome animals and flowers modeled after those found in vintage books and postcards, among other sentimental twentieth-century sources, and the moon as observed by the artist herself. Craven’s emotional conceptualism inheres in these affectively charged repetitions, each of which is accompanied by an indexical canvas Palette used for the respective work’s color mixing and archived by the artist, like her Stripes, for her future reference. Like On Kawara, her oeuvre is a catalog of time passed; like Agnes Martin, evidence of her hand is the true content of her work. With each rearticulation, Craven reasserts her brushstroke as a bulwark against the degradation of memory. Craven lives in New York City.

Recent solo exhibitions include the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2023); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland (2019); and Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (2014). Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.