Roxy Paine: Thermoplastic Flux

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by Roxy Paine from September 15 through October 22.  Paine's substantial body of work as a sculptor spans the monumental and the microscopic, but this exhibition will be the first that focuses solely on his works on paper.  The exhibition will show Paine’s drawings to be a significant and distinct aspect of his extensive and varied oeuvre.

Perceptible in virtually all of the drawings is a layering of imagery, ranging from the diagrammatic, to the topographic, to the pixelated.  Botanical forms, organic matter, and architectural plans are juxtaposed with portraits, real and imagined cartography, and industrial signs.  Paine’s perspective is trans-temporal, it shoots across centuries’ branches of knowledge, gathering motifs from eclectic sources, high and low, ancient and modern. Yet the drawings gradually reveal specific themes – of containment, regulation, boundaries, mapping.  By extension, for Paine, the mapping serves as a metaphor for thought experiments working to understand complex structures, places, patterns and systems.

Paine has long been driven to grapple with the relationship between the organic and mechanical systems in our everyday life.  He is fascinated with the natural versus the industrial worlds and how these two continually coalesce and collide, and the grey areas in between which oscillate from cacophony to clarity and back again.  Through his work, he tries to anticipate unknowable outcomes. 

Paine’s drawings are a vital component of his ceaseless investigation of knowledge in how information is discussed, transferred, posted and received.  The drawings are an experimental way to trace, catalogue, and visualize a mindset.  When looking at them collectively, it becomes apparent that his approach to the paper is an extension of his sculptural process, as if it’s an initial encounter with a puzzle that may later be realized in three dimensions.   Finally, and crucially, the drawings provide evidence of the artist’s hand.   The verisimilitude of his finished sculptures is laborious and engaged, as virtually all of his sculptures are made carefully by hand but appear to be machine-made.  In the drawings, Paine’s dexterity as a draftsman is tangible and compelling in equal measure.

Exhibited internationally since the early 1990s, Paine is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the Trustees Award for an Emerging Artist by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. His work has been installed in prominent venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York’s Central Park, Madison Square Park, and, in 2009, a site specific installation for the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work is included in various collections including the Museum of Modern Art New York, Museum of Modern Art San Francisco, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.