Menil Drawing Institute Series – serie

Arguably the most important living artist in America, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has been a leading advocate of drawing as an artistic genre in its own right, not just a preparatory medium for other works. This catalogue brings together 41 of Johns’s drawings, spanning more than 60 years of his illustrious career and, beginning in 1954, the origin of his mature practice. It encompasses his most famous recurring motifs, including flags, targets, and numbers, and an essay by David Breslin contextualizes this reiterative aspect of Johns’s career. Exquisite reproductions and large-scale details reveal the touch and process of this master draftsman, imparting to the reader a feeling of being in close contact with the artist himself. As this intimate book shows, Johns’s art, at once simple and enigmatic, is above all a meditation on the world around him, a constant investigation of what he calls “the condition of being here.”Distributed for The Menil CollectionExhibition Schedule:The Menil Collection, Houston(11/03/18–01/27/19)

Describing drawing as her “primary activity,” for over thirty years Roni Horn (b. 1955) has created innovative and experimental works on paper marked by both conceptual and technical complexity. This carefully curated survey of the artist’s drawings from the early 1980s through 2016 explores works revolving around the mutability of identity and the fragility of place, time, and language; it also delves into Horn’s unique approach to mark-making and her process of cutting up and reassembling words and images. With sumptuous illustrations, this catalogue features an insightful look at and selected details of Horn’s large-scale—sometimes over ten feet tall—works on paper; the artist’s series of cadmium red drawings; and her cut-and-pasted word drawings that combine well-known literary texts by Gertrude Stein and William Shakespeare with colloquial expressions.   Distributed for The Menil CollectionExhibition Schedule:The Menil Collection, Houston(02/15/19–09/01/19)

An investigation of conceptual artist Hanne Darboven’s artistic practice and her highly personal mark-making as a form of marking time on paper  Hanne Darboven (1941–2009) is best known for her immersive installations of individually framed sheets filled with written formulations and collaged images. Approaching Darboven’s life and work through the lens of drawing, this succinct survey is organized around three watershed moments in the artist’s practice. It begins with examples of Darboven’s Konstruction drawings—abstract works based in transversal and mirroring strategies—made during her two-year stay in New York in the late 1960s. The next section maps how Darboven adapted her drawing practice into formulas that calculate specific dates and durations into a single number, which the artist represented as anything from a series of calligraphic lines to a set of consecutively drawn boxes. The book concludes with a close look at Inventions that Have Changed Our World, an installation from 1996 that documents each day of the twentieth century according to Darboven’s formulas and assigns an inventor, ranging from Johannes Gutenberg to the Wright brothers, to represent each of the century’s ten decades. This engaging overview highlights how Darboven's work offers a deeply idiosyncratic accounting of art and life that challenges time as a linear and objective measure.  Distributed for the Menil Collection  Exhibition Schedule:  The Menil Collection, Houston(October 29, 2023–February 11, 2024)

Television and video’s influence on drawing practices and the ways they inspired new modes of graphic expression in the twentieth century  From the late 1950s to the 1980s, a period known as the network era, television reached its apex as a cultural force in the home, and portable video cameras became widely available. Examining how this new technology spurred artistic experimentation, this study considers the relationship between drawing and art made for the small screen of the domestic television set and early video cameras. These electronic screens entered artists’ studios for the first time and became a new source of imagery and a device that could be manipulated to generate entirely new kinds of drawing. An essay by Anna Lovatt looks at the ways in which early television and video images—captured, transmitted, and displayed through raster lines—inspired new possibilities for abstraction and expressing concepts of self-reflection and surveillance, while Kelly Montana explores artworks made by women who used the immediacy and familiarity of drawing to disrupt objectifying media representations of their gender by recording themselves drawing, often on their own bodies.  This copiously illustrated volume features drawings, film stills, videos, and multimedia installations by more than twenty artists both well-known and heretofore obscure, and includes discussions of the televisual imagery that permeates works on paper by Walter de Maria, the ways artists such as Anna Bella Geiger and Dennis Oppenheim used video to capture performative acts of drawing, and how Nam June Paik and Howardena Pindell treated the screen as a site of inscription.  Distributed for the Menil Collection  Exhibition Schedule:  The Menil Collection, Houston, TX(October 4, 2025–February 8, 2026)