From our friends at Big Red & Shiny in Massachusetts, today we bring you a review of the exhibition Drawing Redefined at deCordova Museum. Author Shana Dumont Garr says of the exhibition, “The works by these five artists were arranged to consider an expanded definition of drawing engaging process, materials, and time. This premise arms viewers with a consistent framework to engage with the work, at times leading to more questions.” This article was originally published on January 11, 2016.

Drawing Redefined, installation view, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. Photo: Clements Photography and Design, Boston.

Drawing Redefined, on view at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum through March 20, 2016, is an entrancing show, with a presentation that is at once spare and sumptuous. All the works on view spring from a drawing practice, although they are also rooted in a sculptural tradition. Throughout the show, the audience is prompted to consider process as conceptual content—a prioritization that may lead one to think about the origins of the categories of art-making, and whether this categorization is in fact helpful. The five exhibiting artists, Roni Horn, Esther Kläs, Joelle Tuerlinckx, Richard Tuttle, and Jorinde Voigt, did not create the pieces chosen for the exhibition as preparation for other work, but rather as a means of understanding and progressing in their chosen (and wide-ranging) media. As a satisfying extension of this premise, each artist carries forth their drawing discipline in distinctive ways.

A host of multi-directional angles open the exhibition with works by Richard Tuttle, Roni Horn, and Joelle Turlinckx. They each occupy different zones of space within the gallery, with Tuttle’s mixed-media constructs occupying the lower quadrant of the wall and the adjacent patch of the floor, Horn’s large-scale framed collages dominating the walls, and Turlinckx’s pieces standing on the floor. Tuttle’s Flower meets viewers first and is initially jarring in its simplicity. The light-pink painted-wood relief rests on the floor like tiles positioned in a four-square. In an exhibition whose title asks us to consider the boundaries of drawing, Tuttle uses negative space as a form of mark-making; the absences between each piece of wood create borders that enable the four pieces to become a single object. Another of his works, Looking for the Map 11 (2013–14), leans against the wall, like a lopsided wooden pitchfork dressed in dashing swathes of fabric. From further away, across the gallery, an even more appealing view of Looking for the Map 11 comes from just beyond a floor arrangement, Volume d’Air, by Turlinckx.

Read the full article here.