Pair of Spirit Drawings

ALAN VEGA (1938-2016)

A Pair of Spirit Drawings

each signed and dated 'ALAN VEGA 2015' (lower edge)

each: graphite on paper

left: 12 x 9 3/4 inches (30.5 x 24.8 cm)

right: 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm)

Executed in 2015.

Two of Alan Vega's late Spirit Drawings, signed and dated by the artist. The series emerged from a creative surge that defined Vega's later life.

Vega had drawn nightly for decades — earlier work being intense portraits of older men, executed in stacks of notebooks as a compulsion or ritual. The portraits began to lose their features, the faces gradually opening into something Vega himself described as Spirit.

Vega's first major museum exhibition of drawings was the 2009 Alan Vega Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, where ninety-four drawings were shown for the first time. His drawings, including the Spirit Drawings Series, have subsequently been shown at Deitch Projects, New York (2017); Invisible Exports, New York (2014); New Discretions, New York (2017); The Armory Show, New York (2014, Laurent Godin Gallery booth); FIAC, Paris (2012, Laurent Godin Gallery booth); and Laurent Godin Gallery, Paris (2012, 2018, 2024).

PROVENANCE:

The Estate of Alan Vega / Saturn Strip, LTD