Fall 2026 Warnock Lecture, presented by the Department of Art History
Irene Small (Princeton University): On the Side of Composition
This lecture focuses the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s concept of the “organic line”—an interval of space between entities such as a painting and its frame—and investigates this line’s character as neither made nor unmade but not made. How does this quality implicate the gesture of the mark that undergirds artistic practice at its most elemental level, as well as various efforts to reimagine or resist this gesture in modernist art? What kind of human subject or author can be assumed as a result? Oriented by such questions, the lecture will utilize the organic line to reconsider the compositional and anti-compositional strategies of such artists as Ellsworth Kelly, John Cage, and Julius Eastman, as well as broader problems of seriality, sociality, notation, and space.
Lecture: 5:00-6:30pm
Reception to follow
Erin Elmore
(847) 491-3230
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