ASSEMBLY LINES

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

ASSEMBLY LINES brings together seven artists working across eight decades, reading their oeuvres through the lens of drawing as concept and tactic, unrestricted by traditional definitions of media and process. The artists are Maria Martins (b. 1894, Campanha, Brazil – d. 1973, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Gego (b. 1912, Hamburg, Germany – d. 1994, Caracas, Venezuela), Mira Schendel (b. 1919, Zurich, Switzerland – d. 1988, São Paulo, Brazil), Lizi Sánchez (b. 1975, Lima, Peru), Amalia Pica (b. 1978, Neuquén, Argentina), Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Buenos Aires, Argentina), and Iván Argote (b. 1983, Bogotá, Colombia).

Drawing’s historic link to preparation, and its hierarchical relationship to painting and sculpture, began to come under pressure early in the 20th century as prevailing definitions of art expanded to admit process and idea alongside object. By the 1960s, burgeoning conceptual art movements around the world appreciated “drawing’s status as a place for ideas to be proposed and worked through (rather than resolved)…”.* It is particularly useful for artists interested in the instability of meaning, facilitating dialectic and interrelational thinking that resists neat narratives and conclusions.

This exhibition’s thinking is indebted to the 1997 exhibition Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing, curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Edith A. Gibson at the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, which argued that South American drawing of the period was defined not by shared form or technique but by a common spirit of innovation and nonconformity: drawing as attitude.** ASSEMBLY LINES extends the framework. From Martins’ 1940s etchings, to Gego’s 1986 hanging sculpture, and Pica’s 2015 sculptural diagram, few of the works gathered here are drawings in the literal sense. Drawing is an intellectual and practical tool, used to think through questions of emotion, space, and human relations.

* Gilman, Claire. “Drawing Dialogues.” Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection. Essays by Claire Gilman and Béatrice Gross. The Drawing Center, New York, 2016, pp. 28-29

** Gibson, Edith A. “Re-aligning vision: alternative currents in South American Drawing”. Re-aligning vision: alternative currents in South American Drawing. Edited by Edith A. Gibson and Mari Carmen Ramírez. Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, 1997.