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Russell Crotty

(San Rafael, California, 1956 - )


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Biography

Lives and works in Ojai, CA and Ventura, CA.

Russell Crotty's vast body of work challenges the limitations and preconceptions of drawing as primary medium, pushing the genre towards minimal sculptural installation. Especially known for drawings on paper-coated suspended globes and within large-scale books, he continues to explore new ideas that investigate and expand the notion of “works on paper.”

His practice chronicles an idiosyncratic commentary on astronomy, landscape, mapping, and the natural and manmade world, with a deep passion for the ocean and coastline as evidence in his surf related work.

Russell's work has been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally and is owned by private collectors, museums and public collections. He is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

A native Californian, Russell grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, began and nurtured his art career in Los Angeles, lived many years in the Santa Monica Mountains – and now works in Ventura and resides in Ojai, California with his wife Laura Gruenther and their two Kelpies. (via artist's website 5/7/18, http://www.russellcrotty.com)
REPRESENTED BY: Shoshana Wayne Gallery | Santa Monica, CA www.shoshanawayne.com, Hosfelt Gallery | San Francisco, CA www.hosfeltgallery.com, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve | Paris, France
www.suzanne-tarasieve.com

Russell Crotty’s drawings and works on paper comprise cosmic, coastal, and aerial imagery. Known for his suspended paper globes and large-scale, handmade artist books, Crotty’s practice investigates and expands the traditions of working on paper—a two-dimensional medium the artist has pushed into a sculptural, three-dimensional format. Rendered in ballpoint pen, Crotty’s representations of surfers on California’s coast to celestial bodies are marked by a seeming frenetic impulse coupled with an observance to the grid; his night skies, particularly, are notable for their hash-markings. Having studied the night sky for decades, both from home telescopes and professional observatories including Lick Observatory east of San Jose, Crotty is a serious amateur astronomer who has made observational contributions to NASA and ALPO.

M28 Globular Cluster in Sagittarius (2000) is part of a body of work that Crotty began in the late 1990s when he transitioned from making circular drawings on a flat plane—as though seen through the lens of a telescope—to creating spherical drawings. Fabricated in fiberglass and covered with archival paper by a paper conservator, Crotty draws directly on the surface of the globes, recording the movement of stars, planets, and celestial bodies. M28 refers to a tightly bound, globular cluster of stars within the constellation Sagittarius.

This work is the first by Russell Crotty to enter SJMA’s permanent collection.

Biography
Crotty was born in San Rafael, California in 1956 and is based in Malibu, California. He received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine (1980) and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1978). Crotty has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. He has been included in group exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida; and MoMA PS1, New York. His work is in major public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Crotty is the recipient of numerous awards including a site-specific commission for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the Guggenheim Fellowship. (acquisitions meeting February 20, 2018)


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