Joanne Greenbaum and Evan McGraw

There’s an experimental theatermaker who likes to ask performers to speak totally without affect, to attempt line delivery from a state of perfect neutrality. Of course the result is what he’s really looking for: imperfect neutrality, thanks to an unforced idiolect, a voice stripped to the unconscious quirks of plain, individual speech.

In the field of visual art, old wisdom says we should be able to identify an artist’s work by their “hand,” meaning something subtler and less deliberate than their style. Beneath their accumulated learnings, habits, influences, pet strategies and compositional preferences, the artist’s hand deposits, unconsciously, something distinctly its own: in Ben Davis’s phrase (from e-flux), “the aura of the humanity behind the object.”

Joanne Greenbaum is a master of shapes, which she often talks about like they are architecture. Some of her drawings, she says, are “modeled and scaffolded or structured,” others “very loose and watery,” depending on the material. Her paintings are built up and worked over in an accumulative process that produces layers and channels, balance and disharmony. Presented on shelves against the southeast wall are selections from a series of drawings by Greenbaum on found gallery showcards, an ongoing body of work seen here in a grouping for the first time. Her choice of medium is practical: ballpoint pen ink is thick and oily; the cards are substantial and easily acquired through her regular exhibition-going routines. She rarely cedes surface to printed images or text, running her lines right over both, but the drawings are not about erasure. Greenbaum describes the process of making them as meditative, nearly automatic. If her paintings are constructions, these ballpoint geometries are foundations; hers is an unpremeditated and instantly recognizable hand.

Evan McGraw’s work, which lines the northeast and northwest walls, is grounded in training. His drawings come from within the tradition of calligraphic writing, a practice he applies himself to with nearly ritualistic devotion; he has been completing a sheet a day for several years. Selecting words and phrases that come to him over the course of his everyday life, he lets letters, or parts of them, stretch horizontally across the page, or otherwise crowd their neighbors with repeating, unruly flourishes, or unfurl into linear abstractions. Rendered on smooth, letter-sized Bienfang or Midori paper, phrases like Uh huh, okay, No worries, and Like a hole in the head challenge legibility. The letters’ original forms are dictated by old rules but the methodology around their undoing comes, unmistakably, from McGraw.

Joanne Greenbaum (b. New York, NY) earned a BA from Bard College. Greenbaum is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including The Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant; Artist in Residence at The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant. Greenbaum has exhibited internationally including at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Kusthalle Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf, DE; and MoMA PS1, New York, NY among many others. She has also been the subject of two major retrospectives of her work, one presented at the Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Switzerland, and at the Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, Germany; and the other at The Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, and the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. Her work is included in the collections of the Brandeis Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; CCA Andratx, Majorca, ES; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Haus Konstruktiv Museum, Zurich, CH; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; and the Ross Art Collection at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Greenbaum lives and works in New York, NY.

Evan McGraw (b. Sechelt, Canada) is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada. He has had exhibitions at High Art in Paris, France; Turley Gallery in Hudson, NY; BIKINI in Basel, Switzerland; Dem Passwords in Los Angeles, CA; and Paul Kasmin in New York City, NY. He completed a BFA at Cooper Union, New York City, NY (2015).