Paper Unbound: The Drawn Menagerie, an exhibition of more than three centuries of works on paper featuring animals, is on view at Christopher Bishop Fine Art in New York City.
Paper Unbound showcases more than a dozen important works dating from c. 1600 to 1982, including drawings by Alexander Calder, Nicolas Huet, Jacob Jordaens, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and Jacob de Wit. With subjects drawn from across the animal kingdom and even from the world of fantasy – dogs, roosters, an elephant, dragons, a phoenix, butterflies, monkeys, and tigers– the exhibition explores how animals exemplify the inherent tensions in art: between representation and abstraction, modern and traditional, control and freedom, foreign splendors and familiar intimacies.
“Many of the works on view in Paper Unbound occupy a liminal place between genres, between ways of looking. They walk the line between science and documentation and a more symbolic or abstract way of thinking,” said Christopher Bishop. “These ways of working reflect our shifting relationship with art over the ages.”
Exhibition highlights include Alexander Calder’s Butterfly, Mouse and Snail (1968), a playful modernist piece that echoes the artist’s renowned sculptural work in wire, exploring negative and positive space through the shapes of the animals represented. Also on view is work by English painter George Chinnery, a contemporary of J.M.W. Turner, who spent most of his life working as a portraitist in Asia, where he also depicted local life and scenery. He drew Two Cows (Macau, c. 1850) when he lived in this international city in his later years.
The exhibition also features works for dog lovers, including Nicolas Huet’s A White Dwarf Spitz (c. 1820), created at a time when smaller dogs began to be bred as pets. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Four Dogs Playing in a Landscape (c. 1790) is a preparatory drawing for a fresco in the artist’s family home, capturing a playful moment of romping dogs.
Paper Unbound: The Drawn Menagerie is exhibited at Christopher Bishop Fine Art, 1046 Madison Avenue in New York.
Alexander Calder
Butterfly, Mouse and Snail
Gouache
Signed and dated 1968 lower right 23" x 30 3/4"
Calder Foundation Registration
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
Four Dogs Playing in a Landscape
Pen and black and grey ink and grey wash over black chalk
10 20/127h x 8 84/127w in
George Chinnery
Two studies of cattle
Pen and ink over pencil
7.62cm x 17.78 cm
Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013)
Untitled (Fish), 1953
Watercolor on paper
Signed and dated lower right
30 x 45cm