EXHIBITION

Ingrid Calame & Mark Strand

James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai, Shanghai, Shanghai, 11/24/2012 - 01/24/2013

ABOUT

Ingrid Calame Drawings

Mark Strand Collages Madrid & NewYork


James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is pleased to present an exhibition featuring drawings by Ingrid Calame and collages by Mark Strand. The exhibition opens on Saturday, November 24, 2012, and continues through January 24, 2013.


The exhibition’s premise centers on abstraction and process by two artists who share distinctive but contrasting positions or guiding principles in which to create their works. Throughout her career, Ingrid Calame has generated images for her drawings and painting through a close examination of the world around her, using as her source material the detritus left by people in passing. She focuses on common stains found on sidewalks, or graffiti along a river bank, or skid marks of a car tire along a roadway. In tracing theses random marks, and combining them by overlaying one set of drawings with another, Calame uses this ‘representational’—and yet not readily recognizable—information to generate abstractions. This documentary information of Calame’s stain-tracings becomes a stepping off point in the creation of formal compositions that engage the movement from line to shape, layering, and fragmentation. Her rigorous conceptual methodology results in complex and densely contoured compositions advancing toward a freedom to play, particularly with Calame’s use of color. The drawings in this exhibition include works from several of the artist’s key projects, including “Tracings up to the L.A. River placed in the Clark Telescope Dome, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona”, “Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and exhibited at the museum in 2008), and more recent drawings generated at a former Bethlehem Steel Plant in Buffalo, New York, and surrounding locations, during an artist residency at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY in 2009. Calame has often referred to her process as a ‘representation of loss’ and thus her drawings and paintings are in some ways a history or ‘micro-histories’ of the forgotten and overlooked.

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