Ann Craven

Courtesy of Ann Craven; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Karma, New York

‘Ann Craven’s bright birds — oil painting enlargements of photographs from a single, out-of-print ornithology book — dare the viewer to accuse nature of kitsch. Craven has been painting such works annually for the better part of two decades, and in their persistent repetition, they almost read like works by Elaine Sturtevant, but with inverted aims: both artists reproduce the familiar faithfully and without irony, creating a personal style out of received images.’ — Diana Hamilton, frieze 

Ann Craven (b. 1967, Boston, MA) is known for her lush, serial portraits of the moon, birds, and flowers, as well as her painted bands of color. After completing each work, she dates and titles each palette, rendering it a unique and isolated index of her process. Craven’s predilection for the copy—both from referent photographs and from her own plein air paintings—is both an homage to Pop Art and an exploration of remembrance. As she explains, “My paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment, and chance, and contain a variable that is constant and ever-changing—the moment just past.” Craven presented her first retrospective, titled TIME and curated by Yann Chevalier, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Karma, New York (2021); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine (2019); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2019); Karma, New York (2018); Southard Reid, London (2017); Maccarone, New York (2016); among others.

Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others. 

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