CONCRETE DRAWING: Extending The Line

Barry Markowitz

“Concrete Drawing: Extending The Line” is an exhibition that presents the idea that drawing can expand beyond the page.   On view are the artworks of 16 contemporary artists, who explore the structural components of drawing and show how these elements can extend from a flat surface to produce meaning in different media.   The premise of Concrete Drawing begins with the construction of a flat idea that evolves into a 3-dimesional or novel 2-D (art) work.  This artwork represents a spatial world while, simultaneously, it pushes the possibilities of the core principles of drawing and engages these possibilities through a broad range of nontraditional materials and techniques.   This is not a new idea, as, for example, Duchamp in his “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” produced, in a very simple yet profound manner, a concrete drawing that literally exploded from the flat surface of the shattered glass.

The artists included in this exhibition are working, inventively, within this possibility of drawing; they employ a variety of materials and methods to create provoking, hybridized, drawings many of which assimilate painting and sculpture.  The artists are: Bill Anderson, Alison Joy Goldberg, Steve Bankhead, Sky Burchard, Enrique Castrejon, Mark Dutcher, Michael McMillen, Kristi Lippire, Kaz Oshiro, Tim Quinn, Stuart Rapeport, Jesse Robinson, Denise K. Seider, Nicola Vruwink, Carrie Whitney, Liz Young.