The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's "New Works: Prints, Drawings, Collages" tackles an interesting shift in the classification and labeling of two−dimensional art in the latter half of the 20th century. The works are united by attempts to layer ideas, techniques and materials, but each piece finds its own place in the range between these three categories.
The space is small and intimate, with gray walls, a comfortable bench and unassuming frames. The works are close together on the wall, some immediately above or below each other, giving the room a more personal, less pretentious air. The plaques on the wall intimate few grandiose concepts; everything is just what it is.
Though the pieces are roughly contemporary, they are linked aesthetically and conceptually only in how they break the boundaries between drawings, prints and collages. Some of the works are more involved, long−term projects, such as Michael Oatman's "Exurbia (more leisure time for artists everywhere)" (2004), and some of it records fleeting memories in quick studies, such as Markus Raetz's "Gaze" (2001).
A whole wall of the square gallery is devoted to one four−part series and a diptych by Christiane Baumgartner: "Schkeuditz I−IV" (2005) and "Trails I" and "Trails II" (2008), respectively. All six pieces are woodcut prints made from television stills. For the four−part series, Baumgartner chose specific moments as a car approaches an overpass. The other two prints are made from two images of Allied bomber vapor trails originally from a German propaganda film.
In the same way that a television makes a picture from dots of color and light, Baumgartner makes a picture by wavering line and varying tone in stripes of ink and paper. From very close, all the viewer can see are horizontal, withering lines, but when one steps back, the whole picture comes into view. The idea of slowing down to contemplate something that happens so quickly is elegant and simple, and the examples are very evocative.
Some of the more visually simplistic but still compelling pieces are Tara Donovan's "Untitled" (2008) and Arnulf Rainer's "Red Cross" (1990−91). Donovan uses shattered glass panes as inking plates, reassembling the shards to form fractured imprints of the original glass plates. The result is a dynamic splaying of white lines threading through stark black masses. Rainer violently gauged the surface of a copper plate, cutting the plate into the shape of a cross and printing the plate in bright red ink. He applies enough pressure that the actual shape of the cross is embossed into the page.
My favorite pieces of the show were Terry Winters' "7−Fold Sequence, Two" (2008) and Julie Mehretu's "Entropia: Construction" (2005). Both pieces distill high−energy, three−dimensional realities into the two−dimensional facets that make them up.
"7−Fold Sequence, Two" is a rough grid of knot drawings representing only positive and negative space. The blobs of filled−in graphite are not necessarily negative space, and the uncolored paper is not necessarily positive space, but the twisting and folding−in of something like string comes across clearly.
Mehretu's approach with the piece was to see the knots almost as planes, bending and turning, and to draw the idea of knotting, as opposed to physically entangled material. The knot drawings are like quick studies — simple and numerous — as if the viewer is watching the artists learn to see and think this way.
"Entropia: Construction" is actually five stacked drawings on almost transparent Japanese paper. And while it's hard to separate the drawings individually, it is interesting to note that some of the layers are representational — of buildings, streets and cars — and that some are purely abstract — swinging arcs and spirals. There is a freneticism and fever to these lines. The sense of the moving and changing city, and of what it is like to stand still among such chaos, is quite strong.
