The Drawing Center will present Mateo López: Undo List, a multidisciplinary installation that will be the Colombian artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States and that will feature works on paper, sculpture, performance, and projected film. Trained as an architect in his native Bogotá, López has long used drawing as a conceptual tool to cross disciplines and aesthetic categories. Drawing is more than an artistic medium for López; it is a way of conceiving and indeed inhabiting the world. Simple drawn constructions that can be manipulated in various ways; trompe l'oeil paper renderings of two and three dimensional objects (for example, near-exact replicas of lined sheets of paper); drawings made out of the leftovers produced by cutting into other works-these are just some of the devices López uses to reveal that, as he says himself, just as everything manufactured was at one point a drawing, so too, "an image is not flat; it is an atmosphere, it contains time and space." Organized by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator.
In our Drawing Room gallery Jackson Mac Low: Lines-Letters-Words, will be the first solo museum exhibition of visual works by Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) that spans the multidisciplinary artist's practice from the 1940s to the 2000s. Tracing the arc of his creative output, specifically through the lens of drawing and handwriting, this exhibition will provide a new understanding of Mac Low's oeuvre outside of the world of poetry. Organized by Brett Littman, Executive Director.
Concurrently in the Lab, Amy Sillman will present a video (or what she calls an animated drawing) entitled After Metamorphoses, a work based on Ovid's epic narrative poem that she conceived in 2014 as a Resident at the American Academy in Rome. To create the video, Sillman overlaid abstract drawings (which were made in a bathtub in Berlin) with iPad sketches that precisely follow the sequence of changes that occur in Ovid's fifteen-book narrative. Set to a score by the Berlin-based musician Wibke Tiarks, the video features a variegated background that flashes beneath a series of figures as they transform one into another with a temporal rhythm. In After Metamorphoses, Sillman exercises the possibility of endless change, a theme first developed in her animated works and that continues to inform her paintings and drawings. Her adaptation of Ovid is one of a number of works that Sillman has made in collaboration with poets, including Lisa Robertson and Charles Bernstein, among others. In tandem with the exhibition, Sillman will create a limited edition zine, the eleventh in her series of zines entitled O.G Organized by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator.
Amy Sillman, Still from After Metamorphoses, 2015-16. Video animation with iPad drawings, 5 minutes, looped. Music by Wibke Tiarks. Courtesy of the artist.
Mateo López: Undo List is made possible by the support of the Rolex Institute, Estrellita Brodsky, Ana Sokoloff, and Ann and Marshall Webb. Additional support is provided by the Embassy of Colombia in the United States through the Promotion Plan of Colombia Abroad of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia. Additional thanks to: Travesía Cuatro; Giorgio Griffa and Casey Kaplan, New York; Galeria Luisa Strina; and Galería Casas Riegner.
at The Drawing Center
Mateo López: Undo List,
January 20-March 19, 2017
Videos