- Tuesday, April 06, 2010
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On Ewan Gibbs's Urban Portraiture
Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curator of architecture and design, SFMOMA
Phyllis Wattis Theater
noon
British artist Ewan Gibbs has created an urban portrait of San Francisco in 18 drawings, currently on view on the third-floor landing. Using only pencil marks of slashes or circles of varying line weights, Gibbs has devised a working technique that translates an image into a systematic grid. From a distance, the delicate drawings reveal obscured images of several of the city's landmarks with subtle shifts in light and dark. Up close, one sees the same tiny hand-drawn gesture repeated row after row. In this talk, Fletcher will present a study of the drawings' artistic lineage in Impressionism and Conceptualism with a distant relationship to Pop and architectural drawings.
Museum and program admission are free.
Image: Ewan Gibbs, San Francisco, 2009; pencil on paper; commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; © Ewan Gibbs
