Art Projects International in Tribeca is delighted to present Small Works, a group exhibition featuring a selection of important works by artists including Bahar Behbahani, Yojiro Imasaka, Il Lee, Gwenn Thomas, Jian-Jun Zhang, and others, featuring a vast array of small drawings, along with small works on canvas, and several works of photography. Each work may be considered a signature work of their respective creator – presenting noted signature themes, renowned processes, and widely recognized styles – that have developed and been part of the gallery’s programming over the past 34 years.  Sometimes translated to larger works, these small works offer an intimate glimpse into each artist’s musings.

Bahar Behbahani’s Growing Persian Garden series of drawings began as ritualistic depictions for an extensive series of paintings entitled Persian Garden. Her research-based works of intricate patterns of flowers and plants incorporate information from her culture’s history and archival materials as a way of addressing questions of memory and loss, displacement and longing.

Yojiro Imasaka’s painterly photographs using large-format mid-1800 photographic methods explore landscapes through ambiguities of scale and space. In particular, Imasaka’s Wet-Land series of photographs are the result of spending weeks photographing the Louisiana Bayou to bring forth the distinctive natural environment of an undeveloped forest – quiet, breathtaking scenery to deaden the sense of time.

Il Lee’s well-known ballpoint pen work over the last 50 years has consistently featured the creation of small drawings. Concurrent with his continuing development of large format works on paper and even larger works on canvas, Il Lee has continually experimented in countless smaller drawings with a multitude of imagery that speaks to viewers with dramatically different and varied imagery throughout. Highlighting the criticality of working on paper to Lee’s practice, numerous exhibitions at museums and institutions worldwide have featured special installations of a single wall densely hung with tens of small drawings from Lee’s studio.

Gwenn Thomas’ series of etching and aquatint prints draw from her signature works on canvas, also included in this exhibition. These dynamic, masterful orchestrations of abstract forms and marks – drawn rectangles of solid color, silhouettes of cut bits of cloth, depictions of paint strokes or a wayward bit of newsprint – are realized by hands-on manipulation of printing plates. In the Song series, the prints feature an arrangement of vertically oriented, variously colored, and isolated brushstroke like forms.

Jian-Jun Zhang’s China series are alterations to Chinese antiques. In some cases the actual antique, usually a jar or a pot, is changed (with clay and/or wood) and in others the work is made by painting over the top of photographs of objects. Painted interventions over photographs add angles, elongations and other reshapings to the depicted antiques and make them look like contemporary, or even cubist, sculpture. A series of paintings often uses the same photographic image as a starting point. The image is then altered differently from each painting to painting. Zhang’s skill at making convincing alterations becomes clear when comparing images and realizing that what seems a subtle change may be a radical reshaping.