Len Lye: Motion Sketch (2014)

“Len Lye’s career was marked by a lifelong fascination with movement and an aspiration to compose motion; the movement of the drawing hand was an important touchstone for his works in various media. In the 1920s, however, Lye began to make what he termed “motion sketches”; abstract drawings that attempted to render the movement of his subjects, rather than their appearance.

Motion Sketch reintroduces Lye’s multidimensional practice specifically in relation to drawing. Describing his drawing practice in his own carefree prose, Lye said that doodling “cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn ‘twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper.”

Lye’s kinesthetic approach to drawing—related to Surrealist automatism and anticipating aspects of Abstract Expressionism—also informed his practice in painting, photography, film and sculpture. Not limited to works on paper; the catalogue reveals how Lye’s concept of “doodling” underpinned his approach to much of his work. ”

Featuring a foreword by Brett Littman and essays by Gregory Burke, Tyler Cann, and Len Lye.

Publisher Drawing Center, New York, 2014
Drawing Papers series, 115
ISBN 9780942324853, 0942324854
97 pages
via publisher

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (low res, 9 MB)
Issuu