An Atlas of Drawings: Transforming Chronologies

In An Atlas of Drawings: Transforming Chronologies, MoMA curator Luis Perez-Oramas has taken note of several key themes and motifs in the increasingly prominent field of contemporary drawing--faces, movement, tectonics, digital, figures and constructions--and tracked them back through The Museum of Modern Art's incomparable collection of drawings, examining each theme from a non-chronological viewpoint, exploring visual relationships between recent and classic artworks, and presenting his findings in six stand-alone accordion-folded portfolios. Each full-color section emphasizes repetition, seriality and the persistence of themes, and together they offer a view of the practice of drawing based exclusively on the selected works themselves, without the traditional dependence on interpretation through artistic movements, tendencies and influences. The flexibility of the accordion format conceptually and visually conveys the book's shifting chronologies, allowing the viewer to experience more works juxtaposed with one another than a traditional binding would. It also creates an ersatz work in itself, ideal for display. Along with one bound booklet including an essay by Perez-Oramas and a slipcase that unifies them all, its unusual format makes An Atlas of Drawings a notable object in itself, ideal for collecting or gift-giving.