During the months of September and October, Leo Castelli Gallery will present a group exhibition of “Text” drawings. Included in the show will be works by six artists: Carl Andre, Hanne Darboven, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner.  The drawings will date from different periods, starting from the sixties and reaching up to the present.

Jasper Johns will be represented with The Critic Sees, a work from 1962 where language is used to describe a sculptural idea, and with The Aim Was to Put a Poem Together, a recent drawing in which Mr. Johns employs the sign language alphabet. Carl Andre will be showing some of his poems where the text is written with a typewriter, while the meaning is connected more to the visual object than what the text represents.

Robert Morris will show On Wheels, a work from the early sixties, part of the well-known series of drawings done by re-writing a text that the artist had previously learned from memory. Ed Ruscha will show Pills, a gunpowder ribbon drawing from 1970, together with some of his more painterly works from the eighties, Wonder Sickness and Floor – which are between Pop and Conceptual Art.

Hanna Darboven’s Untitled, from 1974, is a calendar where the artist abstracts text and numbers questioning the definition of language itself. In another work from the same period, Ms. Darboven further investigates this idea by composing a letter where the text is reduced to a squiggle. Lawrence Weiner through word play and collage, creates images based on the meaning of the text as in How Did You Know that the Shovel Was a Girl & Not a Boy? from 2005.

The artists in this exhibition all use text in different ways.  The show juxtaposes these different approaches by bringing works together to further the dialogue many artists have been having in written form.

For further information please contact the gallery at 212-249-4470 or info@castelligallery.com