MoMA Museum of Modern Art

Lines, Grids, Stains, Words presents drawings from the 1960s to the present that conflate the simple and seemingly impersonal formal and compositional vocabularies of Minimal art with references to the physical and the bodily. Concerned with issues of scale and perception rather than content, Minimal art often utilizes industrial fabrication techniques and materials, and its hallmark compositional strategies include straight lines and geometric forms organized in rows, grids, and sequences. But Minimal art's relation to the body, while ever present in the medium of sculpture, is often difficult to discern in studies, sketches, and other related works on paper. This exhibition traces the ways in which remnants of the physical can be found in Minimalist works on paper, beginning in the early 1960s, when the formal conventions were defined and tested, and follows the applications of these vocabularies in reference to the body through the present day.

Organized by Christian Rattemeyer, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings.