León Ferrari: Politiscripts

THE DRAWING CENTER ANNOUNCES gs from the early 1960s, a body of work crucial to the history of Latin American art in the second half of the twentieth century. Ferrari’s “written” drawing series, such as Deformed Writing (1964), erase the distinction between writing and drawing through the artist’s semi-delirious handwriting. In a contemporary interpretation of the tradition of calligraphy, Ferrari distorts writing in order to imbue it with new meaning. Starting in 1962, Ferrari began to address meaning in writing and printed text, including ideological newspaper articles and dictionary entries. This period of his work paralleled similar explorations of text as medium and subject by North American, European, and Asian conceptual artists. However, beginning with his series Letters to a General (1963), Ferrari’s abstracted text-based drawings became a form of political denunciation capable of evading censorship and reprisals from a repressive government. In the later 1960s, Ferrari became a prominent member of a group of artists and activists who created “Tucuman Arde,” a groundbreaking exhibition denouncing the exploitation of the Tucuman province by Argentina’s military dictatorship. The action remains an example in Latin America for art as a political agent. Ferrari staked his position when he declared, “Art will be neither beauty nor novelty, art will be efficacy and perturbation.” León Ferrari Escritura deformada 1, 1964 Ink on paper, 8 1/2 x 12 3/16 in.

ABOUT THE ARTIST Ferrari’s work has been featured at numerous prestigious institutions, including solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, São Paulo, Brazil (1980) and Il Bienal de La Habana (1983), and group exhibitions at the Stedellijk Museum (1963), the Museum of Modern Art (1964), El Museo Del Barrio (2004), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (“Inverted Utopias,” 2004). In November 2004, the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Argentina, will present a major retrospective of the Ferrari’s work. PUBLIC PROGRAM Luis Camnitzer, The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program Curator, will lead a free gallery talk on the exhibition on Saturday, October 2, at 4 P.M. PUBLICATION Accompanying the exhibition “León Ferrari: Politiscripts” will be an eight-page issue of the Drawing Papers, number 48 in a series of publications devoted to drawing. Drawing Papers 48 will include an essay by Luis Camnitzer and images of works in the exhibition.

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León Ferrari: Politiscripts
Leon Ferrari