A few years ago, as he embarked on a series of new works, sculptor and gallery artist Carl D’Alvia noticed an unconscious shift in his drawing method; as if making new work required drawing in a new way. He began wondering how other sculptors used the medium, asking around among friends and reaching out to artists he admired. While he quickly found that no one used drawing in quite the same way, the constant was the importance of drawing itself: it seems to play an indispensable role in a vast range of sculptural practices.
To explore this idea, D’Alvia and Helena Anrather Gallery have brought together more than 80 drawings made by sculptors over the last half century, including works by Alina Tenser, Madeline Donahue, and Fawn Krieger. Works on view run the gamut from quick preparatory sketches used to articulate form, to rigorous technical drawings produced to aid fabrication, to fantastical meditations free from the constraints of real space or physical materials. The result is both an intergenerational dialogue between artistic practices and an intensive conversation between two mediums, revealing how ideas ricochet between drawing and sculpture as each reshapes the other in an ongoing and ever-changing coevolution.
