There’s a lot going on visually and conceptually in the layered palimpsestic composition of Pure Kinetic Reason – a style that is typical of Graves’s work from this period when she introduced representations of recognizable iconic artworks into her otherwise abstract compositions. So we’ll just highlight a few of the major motifs:

Since this is a Graves, let’s begin with the small camel that appears in the lower left quadrant of the work. Among the artist’s most well-known visual motifs, the sculptures of lifelike camels that she exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 1969 launched her career. Four years out of Yale, and not yet 30 years old, she was the youngest artist to have had a solo presentation there.

The largest motif in this work is paradoxically also the easiest to miss. Centered in the composition, in transparent gray watercolor, Nancy Graves has placed a three-quarter view of the paleolithic sculpture of female fertility known as the Venus of Willendorf. Undoubtedly, Graves saw this figurine – one of the oldest and perhaps most famous of its kind – on one of her visits to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Remarkably, her representations of these cultural icons are based on widely published photographs of them, and not on sketches she might have made during her museum visits and international travels.

The overlapping or palimpsestic schema of these drawings is paralleled in the complex layered compositional structure of her sculptures, such as Canoptic Legerdemain, from 1990. This ambitious wall-mounted multi-media high relief was created in an edition of seven, one of which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Graves’s understood history not as a linear sequence of events but rather as multiple, simultaneous developments. 

In Drained of its Margins, she overlays her drawing of Durer’s woodcut of a rhinoceros, which he based solely on a verbal description, an acupuncture chart and the skeleton of a hand from the first modern Japanese illustrated human anatomy treatise, based on an imported Dutch treatise and published in 1774 by a Japanese doctor who similarly could not read Dutch, but “translated” the text by identifying the anatomy while dissecting a cadaver. In the same image, her rendition of a famous Minoan figurine from the palace of Knossos is overlapped by a precisely rendered illustration of a mosquito, seemingly lifted off the pages of a natural history textbook. And again, you have the wonderfully striated lines of the kifwebe mask. There is a commingling of timelines and places that renders these works at once familiar and esoteric.

ABOUT NANCY GRAVES

Nancy Graves (1939 – 1995) is an American artist of international renown. A prolific cross-disciplinary artist, Graves developed a sustained body of sculptures, paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints. She also produced five avant-garde films and created innovative set designs. 

Born in Pittsfield Massachusetts, Graves graduated from Vassar College in 1961. She then earned an MFA in painting at Yale University in 1964, where her classmates included Robert Mangold, Rackstraw Downes, Brice Marden, Chuck Close and Richard Serra, to whom she was married from 1964 to 1970. Five years after graduating her career was launched in 1969 when she was the youngest artist—and only the fifth woman—to be selected for a solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Graves’s work was subsequently featured in hundreds of museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, including several solo museum exhibitions.  

She was awarded commissions for large-scale site-specific sculptures and her work is in the permanent collections of major art museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. A frequent lecturer and guest artist, her work was widely documented during her lifetime. Her brilliant career and life were cut short by her untimely death from cancer at age 54.