MISSOULA, MONT.- Missoula Art Museum presents Tyler Joseph Krasowski’s drawings and prints in Everything Becomes Something, opening Saturday, May 27. This exhibition demonstrates Krasowski’s full range, from an installation of “desk doodles” to a sublime woodcut print of waves on open water.

Via obsessive, ecstatically neat mark-making, Krasowski elevates his influences and interests—and at the same time elevates typically ‘lowlier’ or ‘incomplete’ artforms, such as the sketch. While Krasowski has earned a reputation as a printmaker, his preferred tool is the pencil. Krasowski says “desk doodles” manifest his creative impulse. A single slip of paper may host a tattoo-style snake, a cartoon cloud, and a fully rendered figure that recalls German Renaissance master, Albrecht Dürer. To Krasowski, the sketches are artworks unto themselves because they are unfiltered. Some become refined drawings, others large woodcut prints.

Krasowski says, “The energy of the original cannot be replicated,” he says, “I believe these to be the most honest ways of my expression.”

Krasowski has exhibited nationally and internationally. He travelled with mobile printmaking studio Drive By Press and was commissioned to design for Pearl Jam’s world tour. He has served as a guest lecturer and visiting artist at a number of colleges and universities, including The Art Academy in Tallinn, Estonia.

Krasowski was born in Minneapolis and grew up in the Chicago area. He discovered printmaking at University of Montana and quickly excelled in the medium while earning a BFA in drawing. Krasowski moved back to Montana in 2017 to continue his full-time art practice in Missoula.

Tyler Joseph Krasowski: Everything Becomes Something is on view at MAM through Sept. 16, 2023.