Article in Kansas City Star by Alice Thorson, “Artist Anne Lindberg’s Line Leads to New York,” January, 10, 2010

Anne Lindberg enjoys a solid reputation in Kansas City, where she exhibits regularly at Dolphin gallery and has work in numerous private and corporate collections.

Lindberg's commissioned sculpture "flock" (2004) is on permanent view in the Kemper Museum's Kemper East.

In 2008 she created "slips and shifts," a 200-foot-long drawing in glass for the Botwin Building in Waldo, visible from the street.

But like many Kansas City artists, Lindberg is keen to test her powers out of town.

Two days ago, she hit a major career benchmark with the opening of her first solo show in New York at the Cynthia-Reeves Gallery in Chelsea.

Following a spate of group and one-person shows concentrated in the Midwest and New England, Lindberg's inclusion in "Apparently Invisible," a 2009 group show at the prestigious Drawing Center in New York, provided the springboard.

It was there that gallery director Cynthia Reeves saw two of Lindberg's drawings.

One, "Parallel 11," is included in her current solo show, which features 21 graphite-on-cotton mat board drawings made within the last two years.

All of the compositions feature tightly spaced parallel lines that vary in density and darkness, depending on the pressure of the artist's hand. They're minimal, rhythmic and at times seem to breathe, with a hands-on immediacy that flies in the face of a daily life mediated by technology and barraged with images.

"For all its rigorous conceptualization and execution, Lindberg's work exudes an extraordinary ephemerality," said Bruce Hartman, director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. "She coaxes unexpected beauty from the simplest of means."

And as seen in the Nerman Museum's current "Aberrant Abstraction" exhibit, Lindberg is not alone in her commitment to the rigors of hand craft. The trend has been building for several years — in 2006, she was part of the Kemper Museum's "Decelerate" show of artists who take a slow, deliberate, hands-on approach.

Executed with a straight-edge bar on a large, custom-made drawing board, several of the drawings measure more than 100 inches wide. Lindberg calls them "walking drawings," because she has to walk to create them.

"The sensation of the walking influences the mark," she said in a recent interview. "The line is longer than the span of my arms."

The physical engagement of the walking drawings led to a shift in Lindberg's approach. Having to encounter the body's capability or scale "caused me to be more attentive to the smallest motions of the body," she said.

She pursued this awareness in a series of 10 smaller "motion drawings," made while sitting down.

"I tried to take out my judgment filter; I didn't plan as much," she said. "Instead of concentrating on how they looked, I concentrated on the gesture of my hand as it moved, the weight, speed and grip on the pencil."

In her most recent works, she said, "The physical making and the mark made are closer. In that sense, I think they're more of the body."

Visually, Lindberg's work evinces an affinity with the spare aesthetic of minimalism. Her admiration for the late Sol LeWitt, one of the genre's leading practitioners, was fired anew after a visit to a huge show of his wall drawings at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

"It was beautiful, so powerful," she said.

Lindberg was smitten with a room-sized drawing of blue snap lines connecting all of the architectural details in the room. Yet for her, living things — grasses, clouds, flocks of birds — have always exerted a stronger pull than geometry. So it makes sense that she would home in on body, the organism she knows best.

Lindberg received a push in this direction last July as a participant in the Art Omi International Artists Residency Program in upstate New York, where she interacted with visiting critics, curators and other artists.

"Three people all used the term ‘indexical,' " she said, "(reading) the drawings as a marker of my body." (In semiotics, an "index" is a sign in which the signifier, or mark, has a causal relationship with the thing it stands for.)

"You feel it," she added. "You know it as an indication of how my body moved to make it."

Lindberg's line drawings have been likened to seismograph readouts, sonic waveforms and medical imaging.

Having recently taken up the piano, Lindberg herself is thinking of them in terms of musical notation.

"I really do think playing the piano has informed the drawing," she said. "Each line is like a note or the strike of a key. When you add them up in a narrative from left to right, the drawings seem to have a sense of the passage of time like a passage of music."

Nuance is everything in these works. For several years, Lindberg has worked with strictly vertical or horizontal lines. So it's shocking to see a slight slant creeping into some of the new motion drawings.

It "toys with a sense of gravity," Lindberg says.

The motion drawings have not been shown in Kansas City. Local audiences will have an opportunity for an update of Lindberg's aesthetic later this year, when she creates a site-specific installation at the Nerman Museum.

And then comes an international showing. In fall 2011, Lindberg and the other artists in the Drawing Center's "Apparently Invisible" show will exhibit at the Tegnerforbundet (a nonprofit dedicated to showing drawing) in Oslo, Norway.

Alice Thorson- KC Star.pdf
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