Libby Hartle

In her first solo exhibition since 2008, Libby Hartle combines drawing and collage to create steely works of simple geometric patterns: a diamond, a chevron, a grid. These drawings are created through hours upon hours of obsessive drawing that generate mysterious fields of gray. Hartle then cuts and collages the drawings into a prepared matrix. These simple shapes play off their random gestural beginnings and offer a duality of spontaneity and order.

Stripped of color, Hartle’s work relies on gradient to imply motion and depth. The messy graphite lines create a tension with the strong geometric shapes that contain them. They may be architectural—a window frame offering a glimpse of a cold monochromatic city. Or if may reference nature—a cascading waterfall.

“If you are of a certain mindset, you will believe that the time, the experiences, the emotions of those hours are recorded and encoded in the drawings. You will believe that the thing that makes a magic object are the experiences that are transferred into it as a record of time. There is a chaos to this- the raw, open-ended line making- that gets shaped and structured through cutting up and arranging of the final collages. A calm composition of disorder.” – Libby Hartle

Libby Hartle lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA with honors in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2000. Her work has been presented at Norte Maar, Pocket Utopia, and The Wassaic Project among others.