101 Drawings

About

Works by John Ahearn, Matthew Benedict, Fernando Bryce, Carlos Bunga, Michael Buthe, Willie Cole, Eugenio Dittborn, Víctor Grippo, Mona Hatoum, Diango Hernández, Emily Jacir, Robert Kinmont, Stefan Kürten, Jorge Macchi, Rita McBride, Ree Morton, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Paul Thek will be on view through February 24th.

The exhibition brings together a dynamic array of approaches to the art of drawing, expressive to the conceptual. It presents the works of artists engaged in explorations of different materials and processes, from traditional forms of representation such as line drawing, ink, and watercolor to alternative processes that challenge conventional notions of drawing such as collage, text, scorch, or perforations. For artists such as Diango Hernández and Michael Buthe, drawing is an almost daily activity that is integral to their artistic practice. Others turn to works on paper as the medium best suited to express specific concepts. While Stefan Kürten and Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s works on paper relate to some of their larger works on canvas, they are not studies for but iterations of these subjects in a different medium. John Ahearn’s portraits and Víctor Grippo’s from the representative and diagrams reflect their practices in a more oblique way.

A seemingly conventional gouache on paper, Matthew Benedict’s work, Foundering Dragger (2016), reinvigorates a graphic style reminiscent of early twentieth century adventure story drawings to imbue the image with narrative allusions commonly associated with the art of illustration. Paul Thek’s expressive seascape, Sea series (1975) makes use of an unconventional material – a spread from the International Herald Tribune − as the surface for gestural brushstrokes. While alluding to the artist’s sojourns on the Italian island of Ponza, the work’s use of newspaper and the exposed date point to the diaristic and fleeting nature of experiences. Unique in its materials is Mona Hatoum’s Clouds (22) (2008). For this work, Hatoum has traced the contours of incidental grease stains on a take- away plate with red ink, resulting in what appears as the map of an archipelago. The inherent randomness of

these delineations and territories serves to question the line drawing practice of cartography.