“Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury” Exhibition

The Museum of Modern Art

This event has ended.

The Museum of Modern Art announces Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury, an exhibition that will showcase approximately 80 drawings made between 1948 and 1961 exclusively from the Museum’s collection. Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury will look across movements, geographies, and generations to highlight connections between diverse artists who embraced drawing to forge a new visual language in the aftermath of World War II. Modest, immediate, and direct, drawing—to use a phrase that circulated among artists and writers during these years—was the ideal “degree zero” medium for this “degree zero” moment. Within this impulse common to artists from across the world, drawing took many forms, from the abstract to the figurative, the organic to the hard-edged. Whether in scrawled graffiti or looping calligraphy, featuring reduced geometry or recording movement via mark-making, these works share similar conceptual and material concerns that manifested specifically in the medium.