The critic and curator Philip Rawson, an eloquent guide to the means and methods of drawing over the ages, points out that until the Italian Quattrocento, no European sculptor was supposed to be able to draw. In the medieval period, only those sculptors who also worked in two dimensions drew habitually; any other sculptor who needed, say, to show a client a proposed design hired a draftsman to make one. And when sculptors began to make drawings (for their own use or to guide assistants), they tended to do so without thinking of the format of the paper as a frame to which the image should relate. Instead, the image was generally treated as an independent motif, composed of mutually related units and placed anywhere on the sheet. In this approach, the space of the paper outside the image was not incorporated into the design but functioned like the open, empty space around actual sculptures. . . . In contrast, Rawson observes, painters’ drawings have tended to treat the usually rectangular format of the paper as a frame to which the image content relates.
—John Elderfield
Gagosianis pleased to present Plane.Site, a cross-generational exhibition of modern and contemporary artists organized by Sam Orlofsky to inaugurate the San Francisco gallery.
Plane.Site explores the dynamic exchanges between drawing and sculpture in the work of artists from the postwar period to the present day. To that end, each participating artist is represented by works in both two and three dimensions.
In an essay accompanying the exhibition, John Elderfield observes that “Moving from the boundaries of two dimensions into free space, artists may feel an obvious thrill of escape,” while noting that there is also “the less obvious but equally liberating escape from open space, with its grip of the literal, for the spontaneity of movement and freedom of illusion attainable in the haven of the two-dimensional.” Consistent with his observation, many modern and contemporary artists have evaded the dictate of the rectangular frame, allowing the drawn line to exist on different planes, and eventually, to descend from the canvas into three dimensions. In stepping away from the drawn line on paper and into the heft and mass of three-dimensional sculpture, such artists continued to negotiate the rectangular plane, even when composing in open space.
