Breaking Ranks, Pencils Ready

Eva Hesse’s wobbly patchwork grid from 1964 presents a loose line-up of funky vessels, antennae, and amoeboid shapes animated by bright color and playful details. These surreal icons seem less abstract pictographs than hints of alien lab experiments. Such play between order and disorder has fascinated many artists since that time. In Joel Shapiro’s 1972 relaxed grid of repeated fingerprints, the sanctity of our society’s legal symbol of identification seems belied. Variously inked, the replications wave in uneven rows that imply the vagaries of happenstance and the range of possibilities that might undermine any symbol of identity.

For the artists represented here, form is not a static ideal but a framework for thought and feeling. Reined in by a rectangular grid, Agnes Martin’s atmospheric bands of watercolor challenge and transcend the notion of geometric regularity. Richard Tuttle’s deliberate, casual notations focus attention on the nuances and ramifications of mark-making. Paying attention to offhand gestures and simple shapes, he reveals the metaphysical nature of form itself.

The Kramarsky collection also includes works organized with less conscious control. William Anastasi’s 1993 Subway Drawings document in graphite squiggles the starts and stops, bumps and grinds of a New York trip on the IRT. Motion and time are recorded as abstract form. The boldly looping, undulating ink notations of Brice Marden’s Muses Drawing 5 (Mnemosyne) (1989-91) are elaborations inspired by the mythic origins of the nine Greek Muses. Marden was struck by poet Robert Graves’ description of ancient texts that referred to the Muses as euphoric, bacchanalian celebrants. Wanting to reflect this “wildness in the landscape,” Marden structured works that evoke the enthralled dance-like movements of the reveling goddesses. The effervescent flow of line in these works is a visual metaphor for ecstatic dance.