Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms examines drawing as a meditative process that invites the gradual appearance of indeterminate images. Selected from the Menil’s permanent collection, this display of artworks dating from the late 1930s to the present share a visual language of emerging forms. Not fully resolved or strictly defined, the works in this exhibition are open, suggestive images that seem as though they are still in the process of becoming.
Artists have embraced this type of practice for myriad reasons that range from an unlocking of the subconscious to an exploration of nature’s most complex systems, including vast cosmic realms and immaterial energies. Artists represented include Lee Bontecou, John Cage, Gustavo Díaz, Hiroyuki Doi, Sonia Gechtoff, Alan Saret, and Hedda Sterne, among others.
On view for the first time at the Menil are a group of drawings by the American artist Gregory Masurovsky (1929-2009), whose delicate marks coalesce into transient swarms, vibrations, or cloud formations on the verge of materializing.
Consider the artworks in this exhibition as portals, each its own point of entry to personal reflection. Notice how mindful looking can be an introspective, even revelatory encounter, one that parallels the act of drawing.
