Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is pleased to present the first solo show in Asia by New York artist Sarah Crowner. The exhibition will comprise a series of new stitched canvas paintings by the artist, as well as a collaboration with the Hong Kong-based scenic painter and theatre set designer, Pink Lam. Paintings For The Stage will be a continuation of the artist’s architectural and scenographic interventions, as seen most recently in her works at the 57th edition of The Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, scenery and costume design for Jessica Lang’s Garden Blue for the American Ballet Theatre Company, and the commission she created for the Wright restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York.

Crowner’s multi-disciplinary practice draws on art, fashion, graphic design, theatre and performance to create dynamic works that recall 20th century geometric abstraction and re-examine the principles of geometry, proportion and the articulation of space that shaped modernism at its birth. At times the seams in her stitched canvases, and forms they suggest, recall hard-edged paintings of the 1960s, in others curved lines conjure biomorphic abstractions.

In recent years Crowner has exhibited her paintings in conjunction with ceramic tile murals and floor installations placed on elevated platforms in a gallery context, creating a bespoke, intimate environment or stage setting. She embraces the idea of painting as object, while pushing the parameters of its reading beyond the limits of the stretcher. Her exhibitions orchestrate a continual play between the surface of her paintings and the spaces in which we encounter them; formal echoes of pattern, surface and colour between the paintings and the architectural interventions she executes encourage a collapse in the distinction between painting and context – between the players and their stage. Pink Lam, based in Hong Kong, is an artist specialising in theatre set design and mural painting. On the occasion of Crowner’s exhibition, Lam will execute a wall painting, as a backdrop for the space on which Crowners stitched canvas works will be installed.