Jean Dubuffet (French, 1901–1985)
Landscape (Paysage), 1951
Ink on paper
11 3/4 x 12″ (29.8 x 30.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art presents ‘Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury’, an exhibition that showcases approximately 80 drawings made between 1948 and 1961 exclusively from the Museum’s collection. November 01, 2020 – February 06, 2021.]]>
Source: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
“Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury” looks across movements, geographies, and generations to highlight connections between diverse artists who embraced drawing to forge a new visual language in the aftermath of World War II. Modest, immediate, and direct, drawing—to use a phrase that circulated among artists and writers during these years—was the ideal “degree zero” medium for this “degree zero” moment. Within this impulse common to artists from across the world, drawing took many forms, from the abstract to the figurative, the organic to the hard-edged. Whether in scrawled graffiti or looping calligraphy, featuring reduced geometry or recording movement via mark-making, these works share similar conceptual and material concerns that manifested specifically in the medium.
Taking a global approach, the exhibition features American artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Sari Dienes, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jackson Pollock; European artists including Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet, Henri Matisse, and Sonja Sekula; Latin American artists including Hércules Barsotti, Raúl Milián, Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar, and Alfredo Volpi; and Asian artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Joong Seop Lee, Saburo Murakami, and Morita Yasuji. Nigerian artist Uche Okeke, whose drawing practice looks equally to Igbo tradition and Western modernism, also has works featured for the first time since its acquisition by the Museum in 2015. “Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury” is organized by Samantha Friedman, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints.
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