In Patterns, Crowner assembles and layers a multitude of patterns that have inspired her recent work. This material is comprised of repetitive visual systems found in nature, architecture, fashion, sculpture, and painting that she has culled from a variety of source media: photographs, magazine pages, drawings, and advertisements, among others. The artist has collaged this material into a moving narrative that establishes a conversation with images of her own work and ephemera, which are interspersed throughout the book.

Patterns provides rare insight into the artist’s process, situating the reader inside the formal systems that populate our day-to-day lives. While the artist’s exhibitions and paintings demonstrate a hard edge, this publication skirts those edges with corporeality, either through the artist’s sketchbook marks, textured drawings, and torn pages, or through the images’ many subjects living their lives: trying on shoes, dancing, commuting, recreating, or working. While painting has always been concerned with the act of viewing (something Crowner does astutely), it is here that we can see the artist and her subjects living amongst and generating the visual patterns that have come to define her work.

Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia) lives and works in New York. Crowner’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts) in 2016 and has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The Jewish Museum (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), WIELS Contemporary Art Centre (Brussels), and the Zacheta National Museum of Art (Warsaw). In 2017 her work was the subject of a site-specific installation at the Wright Restaurant, commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.