Imagining Space:
Constructions of Text and Geometry

Featuring: Art & Language, Jaime Davidovich, Mirtha Dermisache, Julia Fish, Hamish Fulton, Susan Hefuna, Jannis Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, Luis Fernando Roldan, Fred Sandback, and Horacio Zabala

The exhibition “Imagining Space: Constructions of Text and Geometry” will feature works on paper by artists for whom drawing is a fundamental exercise that complements an expansive multi-disciplinary practice. A collaboration between Rhona Hoffman Gallery and Henrique Faria Gallery, the exhibition will feature a wide range of works, from working drawings for future projects to autonomous artworks. The common thread connecting the select works on paper is the use of language as a spatial construction or the converse: mark-making as a linguistic construction. 

Works by Jaime Davidovich, Julia Fish, Susan Hefuna, Gordon Matta-Clark, Hamish Fulton, and Fred Sandback simulate maps or lexicons for spaces – both real and imagined – all of which would be otherwise invisible to the public. Davidovich’s textured Tape Projects exemplify his interest in dissolving the boundary between artwork and spectator; Fish’s musical score-like composition charts a site-specific installation created for the Hyde Park Art Center; Hefuna maps her experience traveling in Japan; and Fulton guides a reader along one of his walks with the most efficient combination of words and numbers. Matta-Clark’s Energy Drawings represent the organic growth of trees, while Sandback renders in vivid color the sublime bound within the negative space of his yarn structures. 

Language lies at the heart of the drawing practices of Mirtha Dermisache, Robert Mangold, Art & Language, Sol LeWitt, Luis Fernando Roldan, and Horacio Zabala as represented in this exhibition. Dermisache’s asemic writing and Zabala’s coded mark-making allude to issues of censorship and lack of freedom of speech in their native country of Argentina. Works by Mangold, Roldan, and Art & Language explore the reductive use of text and numbers to convey larger concepts not easily recognizable on the page. For LeWitt, his working drawings presented the full language of his directional lines, mapping out 144 Variations of this system of marks within the colors of black, red, blue, and yellow. 

“Imagining Space: Constructions of Text and Geometry” challenges the nature of language and spatial construction as marks seek to communicate and words strive to shape spaces.