Ann Craven: Red Song: New Edition

9 August - 9 September 2025
  • Rukaj Gallery is pleased to present Ann Craven's first-ever large scale edition.
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  • Ann Craven (b. 1967, Boston) has developed a deeply personal yet rigorously conceptual painting practice rooted in seriality, observation, and memory. Working with a consistent repertoire of imagery- birds, flowers, the moon-Craven returns to the same subjects over and over, not in pursuit of variation or novelty, but as an act of visual devotion. Her work resists the notion of progress in favor of sustained attention. Each painting exists not in isolation but as part of a larger, lifelong continuum-what the artist herself refers to as an "archive of visual memory."

  • Photo by Winnie Au

  • The same ethos runs through her paintings of birds and flowers, many of which are based on imagery drawn from mid-twentieth-century children's books, greeting cards, and other forms of vernacular illustration. These sources carry emotional weight-nostalgia, sentimentality, the texture of memory-and Craven does not attempt to neutralize them. Instead, she leans into their affective power, embracing what might otherwise be dismissed as kitsch. Colours are lush and saturated, her brushwork immediate and unguarded. Red Song is Craven's first large-scale edition, the 27-color silkscreen spans five feet tall, and brings forth a sense of innocence of wonder and beauty for the everyday experience.

  • While Craven's work often invites comparisons to artists like On Kawara or Agnes Martin-figures who also used repetition to mark...
    While Craven's work often invites comparisons to artists like On Kawara or Agnes Martin-figures who also used repetition to mark time-her sensibility is unmistakably her own. There is a diaristic quality to her practice, but also a refusal to separate the personal from the aesthetic. 
  • Craven's works are, in a sense, documents of lived experience-but they also operate as formal experiments, exploring the limits and possibilities of painting itself. Craven's brushstroke, always visible and direct, becomes both a record of her presence. Each work, no matter how small or modest, insists on its place in a larger narrative-one that is still unfolding. Integral to Craven's methodology is the creation of her Palettes-secondary canvases used to mix and test the colors for each painting. These are not studio detritus but carefully preserved documents, exhibited alongside her paintings or archived in her studio for years at a time. Similarly, her ongoing Stripes series, composed of horizontal bands of leftover paint, functions as both a record of time and a formal counterpoint to her more representational work. Together, these elements form a kind of personal cosmology: one that is as much about process and repetition as it is about image and form.

  • Ann Craven, Red Song, 2025

    Red Song, 2025
    27-color silkscreen on
    Saunders Waterford High White HP 425 gsm
    60 x 43 in. | 152.4 x 109.2 cm.
    Edition of 50
    Signed & dated bottom margin