LINCOLN, MASS.- DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is presenting Drawing Redefined: Roni Horn, Esther Kläs, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Richard Tuttle, and Jorinde Voigt. The exhibition features work by five artists who have transformed the practice of drawing beyond conventional descriptive representation. Drawing enables these artists to experiment and expand their art making. In their hands and through their bodies, drawing is transformed into an exploration of time and space, and expresses their physical engagement with the world. Drawing Redefined will be on view in the galleries through March 20, 2016.

Roni Horn considers drawing to be her primary artistic activity, through which she explores subjective experiences of memory, perception, and the passage of time. The exhibition features recent large-scale drawings by Horn created through an elaborate process of dissecting and reconstructing pieces of pigmented paper over which she adds intricate pencil markings and text. The resulting monumental drawings are immersive records of Horn’s artistic process.

Esther Kläs creates drawings which visualize movement in space. Her direct, process-based works on paper blend elements of printmaking, painting, drawing, and sculpture. The body is also of central significance to Jorinde Voigt’s large-scale ink, color, and gilded drawings which she composes by laying herself across large sheets of paper to intuitively mark forms on the page. While her drawings first appear as abstractions, closer inspection reveals a complex web of colored forms and lines connected with notations and directional signals. The resulting compositions recall musical scores or pulsing organic forms.

Drawing Redefined includes three works by Richard Tuttle that span the course of his career over the past half a century. Line is a primary tool in his drawing process. In one of his earliest works, a painted wood-relief, Flower, 1965, line is not drawn but rather created from the linear space that forms when the four composite elements of the sculpture are laid edges to edge. Additional works by Tuttle shows how he uses color and fabric to create pieces that expand beyond the wall, onto the floor, and into real space.

Drawing is elemental to Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s art, as she uses line to draw connections among objects she has collected over time and which she arranges into installations or table-top displays. Linear segments of string, tape, straw, and dowel are lines that link these objects and measure spatial boundaries. The display of one of Tuerlinckx’s films, TABLE TABLE, also shows how projection is itself a form of drawing with light in space.

Drawing Redefined is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum; Cathleen Chaffee, Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Veronica Roberts, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas; Lexi Lee Sullivan, independent curator,; and Jennifer Gross, Chief Curator, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

This exhibition is organized by Jennifer Gross, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs.