Luis Camnitzer, Mary Beth Edelson, Louise Fishman, Nancy Grossman, Fred Sandback, Michael Smith, Jack Whitten, William T. Wiley

Alexander Gray Associates is pleased to present a group exhibition, Propose: Works on Paper from the 1970s. The show includes drawings and works on paper by gallery artists Luis Camnitzer and Jack Whitten, as well as works by Mary Beth Edelson, Louise Fishman, Nancy Grossman, Fred Sandback, Michael Smith, and William T. Wiley.

The works in the exhibition represent a range of approaches to drawing, including abstraction, appropriation, gesture, figuration, collage, and text. Together, these artists offer a glimpse of drawing’s potential to make cultural, social, or political proposals, through diverse formal processes.

Luis Camnitzer is a celebrated pioneer of Latin American Conceptual art; included in the exhibition are text-based drawings that explore the representational possibilities of language. In her collages, Mary Beth Edelson incorporates images of female icons, expanding ideas of Feminist motives and legacies. Using material to express the essence of shifting forms found in the natural world, Louise Fishman’s abstractions delight with restrained fluidity. Nancy Grossman’s illustrations of her signature mask sculptures question ideas of power and sexuality, control and gender. Fred Sandback’s studies for installations explore the spatial possibilities of line, defining architecture through reduction and geometry. In narrative drawings, Michael Smith pokes fun at everyday activities and objects from the artist’s life, highlighting the banal and humorous qualities of his performance based work. Eclipsing ideas of gesture and embracing the notion of “processed” abstraction, Jack Whitten experiments with industrial materials including Xerox toner and acrylic slips. William T. Wiley’s obsessive graffiti-like gestures celebrate craft and illustration, implying metaphysical and cosmological transcendence in an invented landscape.

Alexander Gray Associates is a contemporary art gallery and advising firm based in New York. Our exhibition program focuses on mid-career visual artists who emerged in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Through consulting and collection advising, we provide expertise for our individual and corporate clients. Our ultimate goal is to provide a direct experience with Modern and contemporary art that encourages discourse around art’s role in the advancement of culture.