MUST RUN 3/28

‘ANN CRAVEN: MOON BIRDS’ ON VIEW AT KNOEDLER w/1 cut

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NEW YORK CITY — Knoedler & Company presents “Moon Birds,” an invitational exhibition bringing together a survey of recent bird and moon paintings by Ann Craven, on view through April 26.

While Craven first exhibited paintings of the moon in 1996, she began the current series of moon paintings — now numbering into the hundreds — in 2001, working on the rooftop of her Harlem studio, also in Maine, and most recently in France, during a fall 2007 artist residency.

Each of the small, square (14 by 14 inches) canvases in this exhibition is a sequential variation on her theme — the moon is depicted in all its phases, with a wide range of atmospheric effects.

The moon paintings, as writer Matt Keegan recently wrote in Modern Painters (February 2007), explore, “repetition, systematization, permutation, and their intersections with time; a foregrounding of process.”

The portraits in Craven’s aviary have been a recurring theme in the broader context of her flora and fauna for more than decade — birds including finches, lovebirds, canaries, parrots, tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, woodpeckers, budgerigars and puff-birds perch among morning glory, petunia, bleeding hear, calla lily and orchid — or as in “Late Night Song,” on a bare tree branch before the moon.

In the catalog essay, Josh Smith comments: “The birds… serve as a perfect vehicle for color and expression.” As with her other series, in the bird paintings, Craven keeps the focus of her work conceptual, through the use of serialized variations — using scale, mirroring and subtle compositional shifts.

In June, Craven will have her first solo museum exhibition at the Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, France, where she completed an artist residency in 2007. In autumn, she will have a solo exhibition at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art.

The gallery is at 19 East 70th Street. For information, www.knoedlergallery.com or 212-794-0550.