“Paper View” Exhibition

“Paper View” Exhibition

The Hole

This event has ended.

The Hole presents a proliferating paper show for the summer with over sixty artists and over 100 artworks! All free for you to come see at your leisure before August 18. We shipped tubes from as far as Tokyo and exhausted all of our framer friends to beat the bushes for the best of what is happening on tree pulp; one can only assume that we are truly passionate about paper.

We are! Back in 2006 I curated a massive works on paper show with my then-boss Jeffrey Deitch for the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece called “Panic Room.” Thirteen years later almost to the day, we check in with many of the Deste artists and also add a whole decade of new relationships and emerging talent. In the previous decade, there were many museum exhibitions focusing on paper starting perhaps with Laura Hoptman’s Drawing Now show at MoMA, at least for me as this was one of the first shows I saw after moving to New York. My collegiate impression from studying exhibition catalogues was that paintings are primary and drawings are demoted, a centuries-old holdover from the hierarchies of classical art. It was great to release all those anachronisms in front of a giant wall of Barry McGee works.

This show is jam-packed so please grab a guide at the front; loosely it begins with some amazing abstract works like the prime palindrome-driven drawings of Xylor Jane, starts to take shape with the collaged works of Coady Brown, Anthony Iocono and Chris Johanson, then kinda explodes in the main room in full figurative form with Koichi Sato, Cristina BanBan, Todd James, Misaki Kawai and more. A Karl Wirsum drawing is in the mix there to show where a lot of the young artists are finding inspiration; Donald Baechler to further elaborate on the influence. In the big back gallery the show continues from comic to more realist works, some beautiful portraiture from Prinston Nnanna and a skills-to-burn Eric Yahnker pictured above. Fine linework also features here with graphite masters Ryan Travis Christian and Aurel Schmidt, Frank Selby and ink champ Evan Gruzis.

I wanted to call this show PAPER RODEO after the free comics newspaper from Providence, RI from the early 2000s by Leif Goldberg and a rotating group of amazing Fort Thunder-era artists but learned the name is sacred, though defunct, to protect the project; a collaborative artwork in and of itself. I can’t emphasize enough how awesome Paper Rodeo was for, like, the history of drawing in America this century and many of those artists are included in this show. Thankfully one of the participants in Paper Rodeo, Brian Chippendale, supplied the pun PAPER VIEW free of charge.

If I wrote one sentence about each artist this email would be endless; I have whole essays to share for each one, many of these my very old friends and some of the first artists I ever showed in early curatorial projects. Exhibiting works on paper is a bit of a luxury as the cost of framing an emerging artwork can often eat up the profit in selling it, but we just couldn’t resist. If you leave feeling psyched about the medium of works on paper, with a bit more respect for pen and pencil, collage and charcoal, pastel and pulp that will be payment enough.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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