Simon Lee Gallery New York is pleased to present The Tissue of Memory, a cross-generational group exhibition that considers the gesture and its history, as exemplified by the practices of Kelly Akashi, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Win McCarthy, Monique Mouton, Josephine Pryde, Gary Simmons, Cy Twombly, and Heimo Zobernig. Employing signs, forms, and gestures in service of inscription, the works on view demonstrate artists’ thinking through the medium at hand and materials influencing composition.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the recent book-length study Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, in which the literary scholar Mary Jacobus posits the work of Cy Twombly as representative of the working-through impulse. ‘Twombly’s [works] can be read as a form of thinking through (not just about) painting,’ she writes. ‘They invoke both the conditions of their own making and the disciplinary formation of art history.’ In its unique fusion of frenetic painterly abstraction with the metaphysical implications inherent to his scrawled text, Untitled (1981-1982) epitomizes Twombly’s unique formal vocabulary, in which the boundaries between painting and writing have been obliterated in favor of a semantic unity of sign and form. Twombly’s marks manifest both the indexical nature of the medium as well as recording the time the mark was made, the latter literalized in Untitled through the central placement of the artist’s date and signature. To elaborate this premise, the exhibition turns to practices that render their means visible, invoking, to follow Jacobus, those conditions of their own making.
