Craig F. Starr Gallery is pleased to present Notations, a group exhibition including works by John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Jonathan Borofsky, Heinz Mack, Eleanore Mikus, Robert Morris, Barnett Newman, Georges Noël, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Edda Renouf, Joel Shapiro, Lenore Tawney, and Cy Twombly. This exhibition, which will be on view by appointment until April 17th, juxtaposes a range of approaches to the idea of “notes” or “notations,” all tracing that fine line where mark-making, the written or printed word, and drawing coexist.

Sylvia Plimack Mangold channels a similar interest in measurement through one of her classic trompe l’oeil floorboard and ruler works from 1975. The title of the drawing itself sets the stage for a contradiction: A 12” Rule not diminished, the length of an 18” Rule if it were. While her system of realistic representation appears rational, we soon discover that although the rulers match point-by-point to measurable reality, they ultimately contradict the perspectival logic of the depicted space. This exquisite drawing was intended to be, in Plimack Mangold’s words, “diagramming how one’s perspective determines perception.”

Other artists in the exhibition extend this interest in marking space to marking time. In the late-1960s, Joel Shapiro made a series of drawings using his fingerprints as a repeating mark, which were, in his words, “about marking time and trying to relinquish a certain amount of responsibility for the finished image.” A year later, Shapiro extended this sensibility from drawing to sculpture with a work consisting of sixteen porcelain units. While one of these approximates a sphere, the remainder were dropped from a standard height, each element an increased number of times, from one to fifteen. About this work, art historian Richard Shiff writes, “Because each drop deforms the geometric integrity of the ball, the artist’s arithmetic count supersedes the geometric order, introducing ever greater irregularity with each repetition…He recorded it by imprinting the corresponding digits on each form, as if to impose order on chaos, but only nominally.” 

French painter Georges Noël also delights in mimicking the palpably physical actions and formats of writing. Central to his artistic practice, and perfectly conveyed in his 1963 painting Alignement Vertical, is the notion of the palimpsest, a written document which has been rubbed down and reused, layering text with erasure. According to art historian and curator Margit Rowell, “To Georges’s mind, his ‘palimpsests’ expressed layers of sensibility, emotion, energy, and memories. Although Georges was not interested in Surrealism, he was intrigued by the notion of ‘automatic writing,’ as a kind of graphic expression that comes, unadulterated, with, in his case, its own symbols and signs, from the core of the artist’s being.”

American artist Edda Renouf is known for altering the surfaces of canvas or paper before applying coloration, and in the case of High Frequency Drawing #6, 1977, she incised lines directly into the paper surface. For Renouf, these repetitive marks and color combinations served as a form of personal record keeping. Renouf explains, “important and recurrent themes are that of time and music or sound: my art works are a record of the days, weeks, months and seasons when they were created, and thus act as a journal of my working process.”

Some notations seem to signify nothing other than their own making. Eleanore Mikus’s Untitled work from 2012, made of ink on a hand-folded sheet of paper, echoes her earliest painted reliefs and paperfolds from the 1960s. Like many works in this exhibition, this intimately scaled meditation indexes both the iterative, repetitive act of folding as well as mark-making in each of the resulting quadrants.

This is similar to German artist Heinz Mack’s 1958 drawing, Zeichnung mit kleinen Frequenzen (“Drawing with Small Frequencies”), which was completed the year after he co-founded the ZERO group with Otto Piene. This spare work encapsulates his artistic philosophy, which he first articulated around the same time: “…the new structural order of pictorial space will be determined by the space value of color and its frequency. The clarity of relations of pictorial space is determined by the eye alone.” Here, any rule, principle, or concept is subsumed within the literal, repetitive act of making marks on paper. The horizontal dashes, at first seemingly irregular, reveal themselves to be aligned with regularly spaced vertical columns and decrease in frequency, moving from the top of the sheet to the bottom.