Verdant Spring: A Group Exhibition celebrates the lush, green growth of the spring season, presenting prints by nineteen artists whose art interprets natural and unnatural worlds. “You go off into nature and sit down,” British artist Darren Almond said while working in the Crown Point studio, “and you can look into one spot for an hour and never know what you’re getting.” On view March 8 to April 28 at Crown Point Press, Verdant Spring: A Group Exhibition explores the color green as used by artists to evoke harmony, fertility, and resilience in etchings published by the press.
The exhibition features prints, both abstract and representational, that consider the themes of nature and renewal. New York artist Robert Kushner, for example, embraces beauty in his depictions of seasonal flowers. Vibrant irises cascade downward almost enveloping a translucent peony in a print titled May (1994).
Montana-based Anne Appleby creates color field abstractions that embody life cycles of plants growing on her property. She often portrays the aspen tree because of its changing leaves and its strength: aspens are able to cleanse water polluted with elements as harmful as arsenic.
Two British artists, Darren Almond and Chris Ofili, use bright greens to refer to specific places around the world. Almond depicts tropical vegetation in rural Africa in his photogravures, while Ofili expresses elements of waterfalls and flora on the Caribbean island of Trinidad in his spit bite aquatints.
New York artist Richard Tuttle achieves a suspended balance in his minimalist portfolioPurple (2001), a set of seven aquatints printed in greens and yellows. “The printed greens are like light formed into images that hover on a plane slightly above the paper,” Crown Point’s founder Kathan Brown has written. In this case Tuttle uses color to express universal feelings.
The exhibition also presents prints by Tomma Abts, John Chiara, Tony Cragg, Mary Heilmann, Robert Hudson, Sol LeWitt, Tom Marioni, Susan Middleton, Joan Nelson, Janis Provisor, David Smith, Pat Steir, David True, and William T. Wiley.
Verdant Spring: A Group Exhibition examines relationships artists have with nature and the varied, organic forms that appear in their art as a result. The exhibition is on display in the Crown Point Gallery at 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, March 8 – April 28, 2018. The gallery hours are Monday 10-5 and Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.
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