Breaking Ranks, Pencils Ready

This kind of freedom pervades the work of many of the emerging artists in the Kramarsky collection. On layered wax paper and beeswax, Christine Blair suspends delicately hued and textured organic materials distilled from plant life to create patterns seemingly extrapolated out of nature. For a fifteen year period (1987-2001), Brad Brown was engaged in The Look Stains, a massive diaristic assessment of studio activity consisting of thousands of abstract drawings that were continually recycled, emended, and recontextualized. The impulse to inventory also stimulates the work of Suzanne Bocanegra whose Drawing Everything in My House series meticulously analyzes the multifarious systems at work in everyday activities. With their casual nature, drawings seem testing grounds for other media. In recent installations and works on paper, Christine Hiebert has composed complex forms out of blue housepainter’s tape—the material relied on by so many abstract painters as a crutch for crisp geometries. Hiebert’s variegated shapes draw on the proactive nature of the tape; they seem like sketches for monumental abstract metal sculptures. Elena del Rivero makes drawings that use abstract forms to refer to emotionally charged events in her life. Her intimate, personally charged Letter to the Mother series makes reference to both Kafka’s Letter to His Father and a seventeenth century correspondence between a troubled mother and her estranged daughter. The personal translates into the compulsive act of drawing in Jacob el Hanani’s exquisite accumulations of tiny repeated marks derived from the calligraphy and patterning he saw as a child in Morocco and Israel. Deborah Gottheil Nehmad burns and embosses paper in patterns of repeated numerical metal punches that refer both to her Jewish heritage and to operations for chronic back pain.

True to their 1970s process-oriented predecessors, however, most of the emerging artists eschew any notion of the autobiographical or the expressionistic. In her simple, highly refined mark-making, Lynne Woods Turner describes an interest in ‘a sublimation of self into the physics of the form, the process and the material.’ Similarly Nicole Phungrasamee Fein strips away all content and outside references in her obsessive, highly sensitized recordings of freehand lines on paper. As she puts it, “I mark a moment on paper, and the collection of marks shows the passage of time.”