Sarah Crowner’s Night for Day conjures the shadowy tranquility of nocturnal gardens

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What: Gagosian presents Night for Day, an exhibition of new works by Sarah Crowner, opening November 14 at the Athens gallery. This dynamic show integrates painting, architecture, and performance into an immersive environment that transforms the act of viewing into a sensory experience.

On the gallery’s ground floor, Platform (Yellow terra cotta) (2024), a site-specific tile installation, immediately captures attention. Crafted from handmade glazed tiles and arranged in a chevron pattern atop a raised wooden platform, the vivid yellow surface evokes the intensity of the Hellenic sun. Visitors step into a luminous, chromatic environment that feels as though one is entering a living, breathing color field—a radiant interplay between daylight and Crowner’s meticulously designed plane.

Upstairs, Crowner’s sewn paintings present a striking contrast. Featuring interlocking curvilinear shapes, these works are saturated in deep greens and blues, conjuring the cool tranquility of nocturnal gardens or shadowy forests. The exhibition’s title, Night for Day, references the inverted filmmaking technique from François Truffaut’s 1973 film Day for Night. Here, Crowner orchestrates a subtle narrative shift from light to dark and back again, using the gallery’s architecture and natural light to create an evolving sensory experience.

Crowner’s practice is rooted in a dialogue with the history of painting while pushing its boundaries into three-dimensional space. Her architectural interventions—spanning walls, ceilings, and floors—invite an active exploration of the relationship between body and artwork. These spaces, at once tactile and ephemeral, engage the viewer through reciprocal interactions of form, color, and light.