Nolan/Eckman Gallery
560 Broadway, at Prince Street
SoHo
Through June 9
Richard Artschwager, an artist turned carpenter for a while, then an artist again, makes drawings of somethings, anythings and nothings. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. It really does matter, because whatever he zeroes in on makes you look.
He might draw a neatly arranged roomful of 1950's furniture, seen from above, that somehow conveys a sense of its owner's pretentions to unpretentiousness. Or he might draw a plop of liquid dropping from a parent mass, or simply a broken pattern of notched lines and shadings ambitious to be a maze.
Essentially a less-is-more draftsman (he is also a painter and sculptor), he sometimes lets detail push him. That happens in "Study of Dog" (1980), a large, friendly dog's head with a child's arms around it, and in the very ambiguous "Untitled (1999), a drawing - taken from a photograph - of a man who seems to be a grubby soldier struggling to carry something that might be a body. But with one or two exceptions (not these), the more detailed his work, the less interesting. In his minimal mode, he gets to the essence of thinghood.
