At the gallery's entrance, a grid of charcoal drawings, intensified by watercolor and gouache, plunges viewers into a mashup of rapture and rupture: a carnal splay of fingers, orifices, limbs, and tumescences, simultaneously parts and a whole, figurative and abstract.
In one early chapter, that introductory image is a grid of 16 line drawings of an apple.
The layouts are plain –- each page is based on a six-panel grid -– and the drawings are not overly detailed, but the emotions are conveyed powerfully.
A sequence of flipped grid segments documents wall drawings he made in Munich in 1968, and a pair of black triangles, one plain, the other sheathed in mirror, pay homage to another sly rhymer of minimal means, Thelonious Monk.
D. Dominick Lombardi achieves one large drawing by presenting 60 individually framed small drawings in a grid format.
Then above all there's the heavenly light that Hesse miraculously conjures up by erasing, rubbing and methodically reworking superdelicate, exquisitely imprecise drawings of grids.
"History of the Russian Revolution" (1965), a loosely gridded compendium of paintings, drawings and sculptural elements — including portraits, landscapes, real guns, windows and plumbing, held together by a clumsy wooden framework — is an ugly, overblown mess.
Uneven wall and ceiling surfaces sported enigmatic scratches, smudges, combinations of dots and grids, as well as drawings and painted figures whose narrative meaning had been rendered unfathomable by the passage of time.
