Drawing

Drawing is a medium that offers an intimate and open field for imaginative elaboration, in which concepts and ideas can emerge and change with relative ease. Uninhibited by the obligation to create a finished and independent object, as is traditionally associated with painting and sculpture, drawing as a medium lends itself readily to the theoretic... al and the experimental. Notations: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process brings together over sixty works by thirty-nine artists from the postwar decade to today. The exhibition focuses on practices that emerged during the late 1950s through the 1970s, a period of great innovation for drawing. Seminal American artists associated with the conceptually rigorous and process-oriented practices of Minimalism, post-Minimalism, and Conceptual art are represented, including works by Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson, among many others. These artists enacted a fundamental shift away from drawing as an intimate form of graphic disclosure toward a focus on material and conceptual conditions. Notations also examines work by subsequent generations of artists who continue to employ procedures rooted in Process and Conceptual art-artists such as Janet Cohen, N. Dash, Nicole Fein, and Hadi Tabatabai-and engage in exploratory relationships with their materials and mediums, including Christine Hiebert and Allyson Strafella. The juxtaposition of both established and emerging artists reflects the sustained allure of drawing as a preeminent medium for artists who embrace its flexibility, immediacy, and economy of means. The exhibition is divided into two thematic sections: "Repetitive and Serial Systems" and "Presentation Drawings and Proposals. These sections reflect the multifaceted character of drawing and its marked shift in status since the late 1950s. While many of the works presented continue the early modern practice of making drawings as finite expressions in their own right, innovators in the 1960s ...Read More