Drawing is a vital practice for sculptors, providing an essential approach to “thinking on paper,” as Alice Aycock has observed. Aycock’s work hovers at the border of art and science and she uses drawing as the laboratory for developing the multi-layered complexities of her three-dimensional work. A series made in the 1980s references the format of traditional board games, seen here in The Celestial City Game, inspired by an eight-century illuminated manuscript for Jerusalem. The sculptor Alan Saret works with a variety of common, flexible materials like colored, vinyl-coated copper wire and lets the material itself find its own expressive form. His gestural drawings describe the volumes of these works in billowing, transparent shapes. Joel Shapiro’s drawings are not studies for sculptures but are used by the artist to extend investigations of shape and form in two dimensions. Like his three-dimensional work, these works on paper use an economy of line.
The Permanent Collection 2015. Art. Illuminated. is made possible, in part, by the generous support of Maren Otto, the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation, Suzanne and Bob Cochran, Linda and Gregory Fischbach, Christopher Harland and Ashley Leeds, Calvin Klein Family Foundation, Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy, and Galerie Lelong. The Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.
