Sarah crowEST’s latest series of paintings brim with the spectre of an encounter with what she describes as the ‘lost architecture’ of Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss dancer, designer, architect and artist). A little-known set of geometric, linear abstractions made by Taeuber-Arp in the 1920s have become a touchstone for an ongoing body of work by crowEST. Taeuber-Arp’s elegant and minimal diagrammatic paintings on paper have become, today, unfathomable in their intent due to archival omission of an unsupported strand of her oeuvre. CrowEST seeks to honour Taeuber-Arp and continue the conversation by inhabiting a slender strand of her formal language to work with it in new directions. The series shown at Gallery 9 is part of a group of crowEST’s paintings currently featured in Call of the Avant Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art at Heide Museum of Modern Art alongside the only work by Taeuber-Arp held in an Australian collection.
CrowEST was a Gertrude Contemporary resident studio artist for 2013-2015. In 2013 she was awarded a PhD by University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts for her practice-led research project An Unaccountable Mass: bothersome matter and the humorous life of forms. In 2008 she was a recipient of the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Travel Scholarship and spent a year at Escola MAUMAUS independent study program in Lisbon, Portugal.
Recent solo exhibitions include Peregrination São Paulo, Oca, Parque Iberapuera, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); #straponpaintings, Heide Museum of Modern Art (2016); Running Order, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2014); The Gertrude Sequence, Gallery 9 (2015); selvedge, order, rupture, West Space, Melbourne (2014); A Serious of Objects, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide (2014); and SOFT. HARD. EASY. C3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne (2014). In 2016 CrowEST was curated into the TarraWarra Biennial at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, and featured in FABRIK: conceptual, minimalist and performative approaches to textiles, curated by Jane O’Neil at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.
WERKSATZ TAEUBER is CrowEST’s third solo exhibition at Gallery 9.
Press release courtesy Gallery 9.
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