Goings On About Town - "Drawings by Sculptors"

In 1931, the Spanish modernist Julio González used the phrase “drawing in space” to describe a new sculptural language that he compared to grouping stars into constellations. “Drawings by Sculptors,” on view at the Helena Anrather gallery through Feb. 4, is a constellation itself, a deliriously eclectic selection of ninety works, by nearly as many artists, spanning six decades. (The show is the brainchild of Carl D’Alvia, a quick-witted American sculptor.) How to confine spatial complexities to a sheet of paper? For some participants, the answer is don’t. Arlene Shechet’s “Drawing Fire: It’s Possible,” from 2022, is a winsome glazed-ceramic slab; Wells Chandler’s comically heraldic “Self Portrait as Turtle in Vest,” completed this year, is crocheted from colorful textiles; the black pills in Josh Kline’s succinctly ominous “Supplements,” from 2022, contain the remnants of pulverized iPhones. The sculptural tradition of the preparatory drawing is also well represented, notably in a graphite study for Nari Ward’s towering “Battleground Beacon,” a public project installed in New Orleans, in 2021, and in Christo’s pencil sketch (pictured above) of “Volume Temporaire Empaquetage”—almost three thousand helium-filled party balloons concealed within a weather balloon—conceived, in 1966, at the Minneapolis College of Art. If this treasure hunt of a show could be summed up in a single piece, the honors would go to Rosemary Mayer’s shimmering arrangement of colored pencil, graphite, ink, and pastel on paper, from 1978, simply titled “Connections.”