DRAWN (OVER): Contemporary Drawing from LeRoy Neiman Until Today

DRAWN (OVER): Contemporary Drawing from LeRoy Neiman Until Today—the next chapter in a serial exhibition, exploring the drawing practices of a range of artists, curated by Tomas Vu and Mirjana Dušić-Lazić—opens Friday, June 15th at the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia. The show will run until July 9th, 2018.

Vu cites the imagination for the string of DRAW exhibitions as rooted in an encounter the curator had at LeRoy Neiman’s own Upper West Side studio in New York, in which he posthumously unearthed a set of Neiman’s sketchbooks. These works, from the artist’s Chicago days (1949-52), tapped into an ethos Vu saw as somewhat out of line with the artist’s more popular works. The pages of these journals featured amorphous figures, rendered largely wet mediums. The dominant hues fell along the lines of chalky mauve to charcoal, with wasp-yellow accents. The demeanor seemed to be mercurial, quaggy.

According to the press release, “This discovery beg[ged] the question: how many more of these kinds of artist sketchbooks are out there? And, where does the artist go in the absence of outside pressures, expectations and interpretation?” An excised spread of these rarified works will be displayed as replica alongside the likes of 70 other artist, including Kiki Smith, Sara Sze, Jasper Johns, and David Altmejd.

Serbia is an exciting place to not only take DRAW but moreover Neiman’s work, while the artist as much as being a lover of sketching was a lover of travel.