Paper: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607

Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Paper, a curated selection of works whichengage paper as a multifaceted material. Inexpensive to procure, easy to store, flexible to manipulate, and diverse in color and texture, paper has long been a beloved component of artists’ practices worldwide. Due to its availability and malleability, many artists develop an intimate relationship with paper in their formative years, and maintain an affair with it even as their practices mature. Increasingly the importance of paper within artists’ oeuvres is being recognized by collectors and curators worldwide with major museums expanding their works on paper collections, curators including works on paper into broader biennales and group exhibitions, and collectors seeking out such works as important reflections on artists’ practices.

This exhibition is presents a small cross-section of unique methodologies utilizing paper.

McArthur Binion has an intimate relationship with paper, which is core to nearly all of his artistic output — whether working on panel or on heavy artists’ paper, Binion begins nearly all his work with a collage of photocopies, their contents sourced from other paper documents important in his life, chiefly his birth certificate and address book. Two works by Beverly Fishman use collage as a form of mark-making, painterly layered material composed into a discreet minimal form. While the works nod towards Fishman’s painting practice, the surface is radically divergent. Glenn Kaino, James Krone, Curtis Mann, and Jessica Stockholder all source alternative paper sources which speak less explicitly towards memoir and more towards a complex web existing between the individual, commercial applications, and serendipity. Kaino’s Graceful Degradation series sources “retired” sandpaper exhausted of its grit, donated to him by craftsmenaround Los Angeles. Each mark signifying a history of labor, the final combination is equal parts tapestry and flag for craft. Krone’s Ris A Wrapper is drawn from a fast food chain, each piece a machine-cut section of an arbitrary, irregular geometric design. Krone collected the wrappers until he found two identical sheets, challenging the aesthetic of essential “randomness” in the process. Mann’s photocollages weave pages frombooks with chemically altered photopaper in dimension that skews towards sculpture. Stockholder’s various works largely feature “junk mail,” so described in the material listing as mail “[she] didn’t ask for.” Responding to the formal qualities of the mail as collage material, Stockholder’s finalworks strafe the lines between painting, collage, and sculpture. Angel Otero, Claire Sherman, and Tony Tasset all present exploratory drawings which serve as experiments towards future artworks, but also stand ontheir own as successful finished pieces. Otero’s two pieces both present early meditations on motifs which have recurred throughout his whole career and serve as foundational material study towards his paintings. Sherman’s delicate studies plot trajectories towards her large scale paintings — though only a fraction of the size of the final pieces, they have incredible fidelity down to individual marks at scale. Tasset’s own studies cross dimensions, his dolphin drawings serving as an early sketch towards his Dolphin Fun sculptures in fiberglass. Roxy Paine primarily is known as a sculptor but drawings remain an integral component of his practice. Always autonomous, the carefully rendered drawings are never sketches for final paintings, but independent workswhich meditate on the conceptual themes of his whole oeuvre