NYAB Event - Drew Shiflett Exhibition

Drew Shiflett Exhibition

Lesley Heller Workspace

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Lesley Heller Workspace announces a solo exhibition of recent works by Drew Shiflett, her third exhibit with the gallery.

Chicago born, New York-based artist Drew Shiflett examines surface, structure, and texture in complex works that are defined by process and material. Imbued with a delicate fusion of architecture, ritual, and geometry, one of the essential components in this body of work is the evidence of its own making. Shiflett’s methodology is one of simple acts -- cutting, gluing, layering, mark-making – through which she generates rich abstractions and the intricate motifs of her “constructed drawings.” Employing a vocabulary that is distinctly post-minimalist, she expands on ideas that exist within grids, patterns, and lineal structures to create labyrinthine, densely layered, and often sprawling compositions that hover between sculpture and drawing.

More devotional than obsessive, Shiflett’s process is as meticulous as it is unorthodox. She articulates spatial relationships intuitively, building content through a technique that requires the precision of a miniaturist, the discipline of a Hindu monk, and that engages a meandering serial narrative the likes of The Canterbury Tales. The eccentric pictorial logic that has come to define Shiflett’s work is located here, within the process itself.

Tactile, earthly and meditative, drawings such as Untitled #60, 2011 conjure ancient Egyptian textiles, animal hides, and the sort of organic geometry that has the ability to morph between Byzantine networks of parallel lines and sprawling hyperbolic planes. Her palette, variants of ochre, sepia, black, and white yields surprising diversity and this, in combination with the translucence she finds in handmade paper, cheesecloth, and fabric bits coalesce into complex and enigmatic abstractions.