Pair of Lotto Ticket Drawings

ALAN VEGA (1938–2016)

A Pair of Untitled Drawings (Lotto Ticket Series)

graphite on New York State lottery tickets

each: 8 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches (21.6 x 8.3 cm)

Executed 1986–2016.

A pair of drawings by Alan Vega executed in graphite on New York State lottery tickets — a substrate Vega turned to repeatedly across thirty years of his studio practice. Before Vega turned to art, he had been an astrophysics major at Brooklyn College, and his lottery practice ran on what his widow and longtime creative collaborator Liz Lamere described as an entirely worked-out statistical analysis.

The tickets became one of the ready surfaces Vega drew, wrote and worked onto, in the same body of work that produced the Spirit Drawings and his final paintings. Per Lamere: "Alan had this knack of turning everyday objects that people might overlook into art… you can't really separate life and art from the man. Everything he did was part of his creative vision."

PROVENANCE:

The Estate of Alan Vega / Saturn Strip, LTD