MOMA
April 22, 2009–July 27, 2009
The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, acquired by the Museum in 2005, is an extraordinary collection of over 2,500 contemporary works on paper. Formed by the foundation’s sole trustee Harvey Shipley Miller, in only two years, in consultation with Gary Garrels, who was MoMA's Chief Curator of Drawings and Curator of Painting and Sculpture from 2000 to 2005, Compass in Hand follows in the steps of a number of important exhibitions dedicated to drawing at MoMA, in particular Drawing Now, Bernice Rose's 1976 exhibition, and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, an exhibition held in 2002 organized by Laura Hoptman. The exhibition features works that date from the ’30s to the present with an emphasis on the past two decades. There are big names like Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton and Donald Judd, but the show also includes a fair share of up and comers as well as outsider artists like Henry Darger and James Castle. Through a selection of more than three hundred works, this first comprehensive presentation of the gift surveys the various methods and materials within the styles of gestural and geometric abstraction, representation and figuration, and systems-based and conceptual drawings as well as appropriation and collage. While the collection primarily focuses on the work of artists living and working in what are widely regarded as five major centers of visual art today--New York, Los Angeles, London/Glasgow, Berlin and Cologne/Düsseldorf--it also includes artists from 30 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa. Established artists such as Jasper Johns are represented through examples of recent work, while others, such as Joseph Beuys and Philip Guston, are highlighted through core historic groupings, and still others are shown in a comprehensive overview of their careers. Mr. Rattemeyer, a co-curator of the exhibition states "This exhibition speaks first and foremost to the vitality of drawing today, documenting a resurgence of the medium's importance to contemporary art practice over the past two decades. The recent work in the exhibition suggests a new approach to working on paper, or rather with paper as a reconfigured material, with assemblage techniques assuming a major role. To understand this recent activity, certain historical trajectories were established: one through figurative works, and the other through abstract, minimal, and conceptual works." Compass in Hand is laid out along this dual trajectory, with each path following a rough chronology from the 1950s to the present. In its exploration of diverse artistic tendencies at the turn of the twenty-first century, this exhibition proudly celebrates the panoramic state of drawing today.
