BRICE MARDEN, AL TAYLOR, TERRY WINTERS: Works on Paper

This exhibition brings together drawings by Brice Marden, Al Taylor, and Terry Winters, three artists for whom drawing is an essential part of the creative process and has profoundly affected their approach in making painting and sculpture.

Brice Marden's (b. 1938) deceptively spare ink drawings are remarkable for an intuitive complexity, with a rich and varied "hand" being the dominant element. Marden evokes an image out of the plane, one that resonates with meaning beyond geometry. Featured will be drawings from the 1980's, whose early incarnations suggest the tradition of the square and rectangle, with overtones of the sober and rigorously spare look of Mondrian or Greek temple architecture. Drawings produced later that decade are lyrical and tangled, with the spontaneous feel and emotional quality of flowing calligraphy. In both cases the viewer's attention is directed to intellectual rigor and to the physical process of making works on paper. One of the works in this exhibition refers to a 1977 design commission for the Basel Cathedral Stained Glass Trust, in which rectilinear lines intersect with diagonals.

Al Taylor's (b. 1948, d. 1999) idiosyncratic drawing and three-dimensional works suggest objects that have wrested control from the artist, determined to go about their obstinate but humorous way. His process is under the spell of wriggly lines, drips, and loops, whose forms are often whimsical and seem to have no beginning or end. Taylor is a constructionist, not a Constructivist. Objective reality is scrambled and folded in upon itself, projecting a visually disconcert ping pong between plane and dimension. Through modest use of materials like hot rolled steel, wires, plastic and wood and zany subjects like dog piss, puddles, and tin cans, Taylor urges the viewer to the state of suspended belief in which these objects transcend whimsy to become a matter of concrete perception.

Also on view will be a selection of pencil drawings by Terry Winters (b. 1949) from the series Foundations and Systems (1994-1995). Through a manipulation of line and space, Winters draws upon the analytical and empirical—technology, physics, and biology—to explore painterly expressiveness and postmodern abstraction. An unabashed sensuality and attention to gesture and depth give his works a tactile presence that is clearly the product of a meditation on art as both a metaphysical and an intellectual activity.