#viewing program

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A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive

This page from Drawing Papers 84 features Untitled (air), created with white tape on paper by Marietta Hoferer in 2008.

The exhibition Apparently Invisible: Selections Spring 2009 presented work by nine artists selected from the Viewing Program. The pieces included in the exhibition skirted the edge of perception and cognition, and required a visual recalibration. Many of the artworks were physically hard to see: optical boundaries were blurred between the object and the gallery space, between figure and ground, and so the works required a very careful kind of inspection, a literal double take.

At first glance, Hoferer’s meticulous, grid-like formations and white-on-white surfaces are all but imperceptible. Yet as one’s eyes adjust, the geometric patterns become more apparent, revealing a luminous surface that changes with the light and one’s shifting vantage point.

The Drawing Papers are a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. For more information on Drawing Papers 84 please click here.

-Kate Robinson, Bookstore Manager

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A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive

This page from Drawing Papers 80 features What if I Could Draw a Bird that Could Change the World?, an oil stick on paper drawing created by Kathleen Henderson in 2007.

The 2008 exhibition, curated by Nina Katchadourian, featured the work of Viewing Program artist Kathleen Henderson. Using her chosen medium of oil stick on paper, the artist deployed a sparse, tense, and energetic line to make drawings that are at turns comic, perverse, poignant, and brutal. Henderson worked with the radio on, the sounds of talking pundits and news stories filtering through her onto the page where ambiguous scenarios offer playful or possibly sinister interactions. By offering disquieting representations of patterns of human behavior, her work asks us to consider our own complicity in and capacity for violence as well as benevolence. 

The Drawing Papers are a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. For more information on Drawing Papers 80 please click here.

 -Kate Robinson, Bookstore Manager 

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A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive

On this page from Drawing Papers 75 you will find Untitled (Blue Corner) drawn with ink on paper by Tina Schneider in 2007. Schneider was part of the Selections Spring 2008 exhibition, curated by Nina Katchadourian, featuring a small group of artists from the Viewing Program.

Schneider writes that, “Paper and ink are the starting point for my drawings. Building up and out from very simple materials, architectures are unearthed. Ink is applied in a diverse language of lines and dashes, dots and drips.  The paper is deconstructed, shaped, pieced together, and cut through. Paper and ink call and respond to each other through endless revisions and transformations, converging at last upon a reinvented space.  In the drawings’ final form, there is no hierarchy between an ink line, the seam between two cut edges, or the wrinkling of the paper. Each element is as vital to the whole as the next.”

The Drawing Papers are a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. For more information about Drawing Papers 75, click here.

-Kate Robinson, Bookstore Manager

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A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive

This page from Drawing Papers 71 features Untitled (#56), drawn with pencil on paper by Sally Tittmann in 2007. 

Tittmann’s work was part of a Viewing Program group show called Non-Declarative Art, curated by Luis Camnitzer in 2007. The intention of the show was to gather a group of drawing-based artists who were intelligently exploring the non-emission or the minimization of information. Cramitzer writes of Tittman’s work: “For the last several years she has been drawing indefinable creatures.  Somewhere between a rock and a potato, they read alternately as living and non-living matter and point to an idea of the original state of the universe. Her subtle, impeccably accomplished graphite drawings could be seen to represent, with incredible accuracy, the state of primeval things before they have been defined or assigned equivocal meanings.”

The Drawing Papers are a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. For more information about Drawing Papers 71, click here.

-Kate Robinson, Bookstore Manager

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A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive

This page from Drawing Papers 47 features It Doesn’t Hurt Anymore, created by Jennie White in 2002.

The 2004 exhibition Talespinning presented the work of fourteen Viewing Program artists who explored allegories of the fantastical, the uncanny, and the mundane.  Influenced by such diverse sources as literature, fairy tales, comics, newspapers, atlases, and hand-made signs, the artists produced works in which reality and fiction collide without resolution.

Jennie White explores the simplest forms of context in her work: a plain sheet of white paper, letter-size, inscribed with words, phrases, and designs, both floral and geometric. These inscriptions and designs are drawings formed by tiny holes pierced through the paper with needles.

The Drawing Papers are a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. For more information on Drawing Papers 47 please click here.

-Kate Robinson, Bookstore Manager

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Selections 25

Throwback Thursday!

In February 1984, we opened Selections 25, an exhibition featuring the work of 10 then-emerging artists selected from our Viewing Program. The pieces presented in the show varied in media, but all of them, from Steven Layton Buckley’s abstract expressionist drawings to Timothy Daly’s charcoal interiors, explored different iterations of paper as the central element of an artwork.

Among the works featured in the 25th installment of our Selections series were Wayne Enstice’s “Funny Papers”, a group of drawings done on newspaper, and Jill Moser’s surfaces made on mylar ripped from a roll. Tandall Dahlgren limited his palette to black, white, and primary colors while Walter Gurbo’s paintings used only warm white and black and were inspired by old Bible illustrations. Intentions and source materials differed widely as well: Paul Smith’s drawings were experiments in perspective with which he strived for a sense of realism, William Wilkins worked with symbols such as letters from the alphabet, and Levent Tuncer’s large drawing was a compilation of crowd scenes made up of nine panels.

Images:

Installation views at The Drawing Center, 1984.

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Selections 24

Throwback Thursday!

Our first show in 1984, Selections 24, featured the work of ten artists selected from our Viewing Program.Viewpoint, scale, and mood were key issues in this exhibition as the artists drew inspiration from their environment, whether concentrating on an interior, the confusion of a metropolitan cityscape, or the tranquility of a rural panorama.

Among the work featured were Nedra Newby’s drawings, which presented a call for the preservation of Adam Purple’s garden on New York’s Lower East Side. Debora Gilbert Ryan collected photos from newspapers and magazines depicting the hand gestures of corporate executives, and Erik Sandgren produced an allegorical portrayal of nature saddened by the presence of man. Shadowy forms in Patricia McCoy’s dark drawings allude to landscape, Michael Conelly combined a group of images from old works in low-relief pastiche, and Carl Lehmann-Haupt’s gouache drawings were done of the same location at different times a day. Joan Weber made small drawings using dry pigment and Eirc Holgman used a litho pencil for his delicately drawn genre studies. Viewers were encouraged to pick Paul Hunter’s work up and hold it to the light, providing a glimpse into the tiny lit interiors fabricated from cut paper and cardboard.

Images:

Michael Connelly, Bulletin Board, Birds, and Diver, 1988. Cut and painted cardboard, dimensions variable.

Installation view at The Drawing Center, 1988

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A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive

This page from Drawing Papers 39 features a detail of Sample and Hold made with acrylic and paper inlay on wall by Jeff Konigsberg in 2003.

The 2003 exhibition Internal Excess: Selections Fall 2003 brought together the work of 13 Viewing Program artists explore corporeal and architectural, as well as immaterial and metaphysical, internal spaces, providing alternative to imagining the interior simply as a retreat into a physical space or some otherwise insular place of order.  Jeff Konigsberg meticulously cut into layers of Sheetrock, exposing The Drawing Room’s internal structure and revealing thereby “unseen and invented architectural elements…a personal interpretation of four-dimensional space, where interior and exterior are simultaneously revealed.” Through the use of incision and inlay, Konigsberg transformed the white wall of the gallery into a mosaic of geometric patterns with flourishes informed by Islamic architecture.

The Drawing Papers are a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. For more information about Drawing Papers 39, click here.

 -Kate Robinson, Bookstore Manager