Archived Exhibition

Cain Schulte Gallery is proud to present Time Being, a 15-year retrospective of Linda Karshan’s drawings and prints. The exhibition runs from October 9 to November 15, 2008. Artist reception: Thursday, October 9, 2008, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

This exhibition, the first major U.S. retrospective of the renowned artist’s work, aims to provide an overview of Linda Karshan’s oeuvre while focusing on the development of the grid-like form, a theme that Karshan found and refined intuitively over the course of the past 15 years. The selection includes over 40 works on paper from 1993 to 2008.

The earliest drawing in the exhibition, from 1983, is like an apocalyptic storm. But in 1994 she began to adopt a simple procedure of rhythmic repetition, creating grids, rows and stacks, drawn with her 'wrong' hand. Minimal in their means and abstract in appearance, they are charged with an intuitive energy and directly reflect her bodily engagement with the work. In a performance-based process, Linda Karshan uses timed breathing and rhythmic coordinates to draw vertical and horizontal dashes that form square-, rectangle-, and grid-like jottings. Hovering over the paper on the table “listening to those internal numbers and rhythms that guide my moves” Karshan works her way around the page, turning it counter-clockwise on the stroke of 2,4,6 or 8 before starting again. The drawings are the result of the dance, and each line is the product of daily practice, rituals strictly observed, exercises performed as ceremonies, which she defines as “drawing my being.”

Karshan draws instinctively, according to her “inner choreography.” Consequently each mark on the paper represents a specific moment in time, generated by Karshan’s internal rhythm. “The length of the line (its measure) is exactly as long as the time it takes to be made. The measure of space is the measure of time.”

The dance-like process is most evident in a 2007 video collaboration with dancer Viviana Durante and filmmakers Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, which will be projected in the gallery during the retrospective.

While the simplicity of form and elemental sign of Karshan’s drawings seem to pay homage to Minimalism’s sparseness, the anthropomorphic connotations of her work are one of many aspects that differentiate Linda Karshan's highly individual work from the mainstream of Minimal Art. In fact, rather than planning her drawings arbitrarily, Karshan draws instinctively, according to her inner choreography, and uses her own physical coordinates—her height, the length of her arms—to create her pieces. A series of drawings in 1994 is then titled: “Self-Portrait” to overtly signal this organic relationship.

Influenced heavily by her studies of psychology, Karshan draws inspiration from such figures as Paul Klee, Plato, Borges, and Samuel Beckett: in the Timaeus of Plato, for example, she finds confirmation for her belief that the universe is ordered by numbers. Her own visual language of counting and turning according to the binary rhythms of nature is not just a method in Linda Karshan's drawings; it is a means, above all, of trying to make sense of the laws of the universe, and to articulate them to the human level.

Linda Karshan born in Minneapolis, MN, has lived in London since 1968. Trained in the Bauhaus method of drawing at Skidmore College, NY, and educated in the psychoanalytical theories of Donald Winnecott, Karshan took on her studio in London in 1983. Since then, she maintains her absolute commitment to work that is unimpinged-upon—above all those dance-like procedures that emerged in 1994. Her work is regularly exhibited in galleries in London, Cologne, Munich, New York and San Francisco. Major museum exhibitions include Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (2002); Institute Valencia d’Art Modern (2002); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2003); Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2007); and the Folkwang Museum, Essen (2008). Karshan’s work is held in the collections of the British Museum, Tate, Contemporary Arts Society, Arts Council Collection, and Ashmoleon (Oxford) in the U.K.; IVAM, Valencia; Duke Franz Von Bayern Collection and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Germany; Middlesbrough Art Gallery, Cleveland, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Fogg Museum, Boston; Tang Museum, and most recently, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, which acquired 13 of her drawings.