Graphite: Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN

Graphite is on view December 7, 2012, to June 2, 2013, in the IMA’s June M. McCormack Forefront Galleries. Among the more than 50 works in the exhibition, visitors encounter Carl Andre’s Graphite Cube Sum of Numbers (2006), composed of 164 units of machined graphite arranged in a geometric progression on the gallery floor. Kim Jones has created a new War Drawing that extends from an existing graphite on oil cloth work and depicts an elaborate battlefield diagram pitting “x” against “o” figures in an ongoing war of markings and erasures. Additional commissions include site-specific installations by Judith Braun, Karl Haendel, and Dan Shaw-Town, as well as new drawings by Joyce Hinterding, which engage the conductive properties of graphite to resonate to the local electromagnetic environment. Also featured are works from Robert Longo’s “Heritage” series—intimately scaled drawings of iconic artworks that have inspired and informed Longo’s practice. This open-ended interrogation of a medium demonstrates graphite’s shifting identity and provokes its reconsideration not just as physical matter that can be manipulated, but as conceptual material whose cultural connotations can be harnessed as well.

Artists in the exhibition include Carl Andre (b. 1935, American); Judith Braun (b. 1947, American); T.R. Ericsson (b. 1972, American); Dan Fischer (b. 1977, American); Roland Flexner (b. 1944, French); Michaela Frühwirth (b. 1972, Austrian); Karl Haendel (b. 1976, American); Joyce Hinterding (b. 1958, Australian); Christian Holstad (b. 1972, American); Kim Jones (b. 1944, American); Robert Longo (b. 1953, American); Adam McEwen (b. 1965, English); Geof Oppenheimer (b. 1973, American); Dan Shaw-Town (b. 1983, English); and Molly Springfield (b. 1977, American).