Ann Craven, Sunset Moon Bird, 2023

Ann Craven

Sunset Moon Bird, 2023

18 color screen print on Somerset Velvet warm white 400gsm paper

Pencil signed, titled, dated and numbered 58/100 by Anne Craven on the front

29 9/10 × 23 3/5 inches

Unframed

Pencil signed, titled, dated and numbered 58/100 by Anne Craven on the front.
This print was created to celebrate the ICA's 75th anniversary.

Ann Craven has been making paintings of birds since the late 1990s, inspired by colour-plates found in her Italian grandmother’s vintage ornithology books. Like the moon the birds serve as a touchstone for memory, each repetition of the image a revisiting of a moment, a recalling of loved ones. Paintings of other animals, flowers, portraits of family and friends soon followed, in the same diaristic deployment.
For Craven, her bird paintings have totemic power: each is unique but each is also a stand-in for the people and scenarios she might have painted, were she a portrait painter. They embody memories, and offer a chance for the artist to covet her artistic history while encoding it with her current inner-life.

More about Anne Craven:
Ann 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.

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.

Courtesy of Karma