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Sarah Vanderlip: Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings
Winner of the Marjorie Schiele Prize

September 29–December 9, 2012

(Cincinnati, OH – August 17, 2012)

Shimmering outlines of buildings hover in Sarah Vanderlip’s graphite and silvered Mylar drawings entitled Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings at the Cincinnati Art Museum September 29–December 9, 2012. Vanderlip is the inaugural winner of the Marjorie Schiele Prize, and here uses architectural drawings to stretch the limitations of sculpture, drawing, and space. The exhibition features five large format works, some approaching thirteen by seven feet in size.

“Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings underscores the hybridized and expanded field of contemporary art today,” states James Crump, Chief Curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum. “Vanderlip’s works strongly suggest sculpture’s relationship with drawing and painting and architecture, and this artist’s particular penchant to move back and forth between two- and three-dimensionality.”

A sculptor by training, possessing an MFA from Yale University, Vanderlip’s work exploits the relationships that exist between media. She began this series of drawings in 2006, ten years after her architect father’s death, by drawing his original architectural drawings, plans, and elevations from the 1960s and 1970s with silvered Mylars. Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings creates visual dilemmas, for as viewers we inhabit these drawings (buildings) with our own reflections and at the very same time we inhabit the gallery space. Unlike a mirror, the silvered Mylar makes our reflection ambiguous; the displaced light reflecting from the surface of these hanging objects creates an illusory space that does not physically exist and yet it is present, made kinetic, and three-dimensional.

The Marjorie Schiele Prize is a triennial competition that honors the work and legacy of Marjorie Schiele, a Cincinnati artist whose generous bequest established the Prize. The international juried competition was open to living artists who present a vision or model for transforming our present reality by stretching the limitations of painting and sculpture. The jurors that selected Vanderlip as the inaugural Marjorie Schiele Prize winner included Claudia Gould, Director, Jewish Museum (New York); Max Hollein, Director, Städel Museums (Frankfurt, Germany); and Cincinnati Art Museum Director, Aaron Betsky.