Sara Crisp: Recent Work

April 5 - May 5, 2007

Denise Bibro Fine Art, 529 West 20th Street, Chelsea, NYC, is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition of Sara Crisp, Recent Work, from April 5 – May 5.

Sara Crisp’s solo exhibition at Denise Bibro Fine Art continues her explorations in mixed media, found objects, and encaustic painting. Her work thrives on oppositions, balancing the personal with the universal; organic and geometric; the concrete and the abstract.

Crisp embeds found organic objects such as starfish, butterfly wings and fossils into the wax surfaces of her paintings. They have often been compared to medieval reliquaries, fossilized amber, and naturalist’s journals. Although the placement of the component objects is carefully planned, she comes across these artifacts by chance. This duality between control and spontaneity is prominent in the work. The result is visually seductive and symbolically suggestive, balancing scientific objectivity and romantic subjectivity. Her work comes across as precise, even clinical, at times, their surfaces scored and traversed by carefully measured lines and geometric forms. Carefully fashioned, polygonal sections of mica, a transparent mineral, cover the center of each painting. Although the regular patterns incised in the wax and the natural geometry of the embedded organic artifacts suggest something calculated and mathematical, their personal, hand-made and individualized aspects ultimately win out.

In addition to celebrating the process involved in creating an object, Crisp’s art functions as a memorial to the once-living objects inside the work. In the spirit of post-Minimalists such as Jackie Winsor and Lynda Benglis, the marks on her surfaces also function as placeholders on a timeline of personal activity, although, Crisp’s work has a humanity that escapes many of her forebears.

The artist’s marks, along with the fossils themselves, are all life-affirming in as much as they are souvenirs of time passed. However, ultimately, this artistic recordkeeping and classification of time is only a symbolic gesture. The past is captured and stabilized but not reclaimed.

Sara Crisp studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has had several solo exhibitions throughout the United States and has won numerous awards including the Best of Show prize at the Cambridge Art Association National Prize Show and an artist’s grant from the Maine Arts Commission. Crisp’s work has been shown most recently at June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Portland, ME; Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, IL, and the Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA. She has also received notices in The Boston Globe, Art New England, and The New York Times.

There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, April 5 from 6-8pm.