Brice Marden: Graphite Drawings

Graphite Drawings includes 25 of Brice Marden's seminal early works on paper and accompanies the first exhibition devoted solely to this body of work. The drawings, made between 1962 and 1981, feature luxurious surfaces of graphite and beeswax worked into dense, reflective planes of blacks, whites and grays. Within these surfaces, Marden reveals the underlying geometries of the rectangle and the grid, a formal strategy that has characterized his work from the 1960s to the present. Art historian Richard Schiff has written of these works, "Marden's black reveals its qualities only to those who look and can see its changes Each area of blackness has its history, its experiential specificity." Accompanying the illustrations are an essay by Paul Galvez, a 1976 interview with the artist by Ed Howard (published here for the first time) and extensive documentation on each work featured in the exhibition.