Many artists used gesture and distortion to depict a version of the body that is informed by, but breaks with academic tradition. The second section, Life Drawing and Distortion, explores the way that coded lines play a part in semi-figural, expressive life drawings. While Kandinsky’s fluid abstractions were inspired by music or nature, Rodchenko used tools, like the compass, to create purely non-objective, geometrical compositions. Both artists were interested in a radically new aesthetic that could express the ideas of the modern era, yet the two disagreed about their methods and intentions. The first section, Espressionist Modes and Methods explores the tension between two giants of modern abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Rodchenko. This exhibition will be divided into four sections. Expressive drawing in our contemporary era challenges our values, resists oppression, and expresses beyond conventions. Politics of the personal and cultural have become essential to contemporary artists who are still experimenting with, reinventing, and appropriating the expressive line. When placed in their historical context, the works in this exhibition claim line as an expressive tool, rethinking its academic use. Using the expressive line, these artists employed new techniques and concepts, and thereby expanded the definition of drawing. In this exhibition, the expressive line transforms and transcends, to speak beyond the private and conventional foundations of drawing.
#XPRESSIVE THREADS CODE#
These artists used the expressive line as a code to signify a variety of meanings, ranging from the observational to the personal and political. These innovative lines arrived in many forms as is evident in the variety of mark-making techniques, materials, and shapes that make up the works on view. This exhibition explores drawings by modern and contemporary artists who created a new, expressive line-based language. In the 20th century, Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist artists rejected the rigid hierarchy and naturalistic drawing style promoted by the academy and embraced experimental images that challenged traditional drawing aesthetics and materials. Like a ghost of a passing feeling, memory, or movement, the expressive line appears urgent, essential, gestural and private. The drawn line echoes the movement of the hand, and seems by extension to trace the meanderings of the artist’s thoughts. Melanie Griffith, Ji-In Jeong, Maggie North, and Juliana Ward Curatorial Statementĭirect and accessible, drawing more than any other medium offers a window into the artist’s process.
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