Drawings

“The way of an artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender.” — Agnes Martin

Throughout her career, Madansky’s art practice has consistently and genuinely straddled film and drawing/painting. While in her early years, these drawings, paintings and text works ran parallel to the political subjects of her films and circled around intersections of Jewish identity, feminism, nationalism, and trauma. Their evolution indicates an expansion of sphere and sensibility towards the psychological geographies and existential energies embodied in patterns and repetitions. .

In later years, her daily drawing practice took on a more pronounced, yet discreet, abstract direction. The abstraction is a distinct unraveling of representation – what starts as a depiction evolves into abstract loose linear repetitions and markings. They are works that emerged from a process closer to ritual, obsession and automatic writing practices, resulting in a proliferation of daily articulations, becoming  lines and forms of interiorization.

This practice of hundreds upon hundreds of works, made over the last  twenty five years developed a language embodied by repetition comprised of circles, dots, lines, grids and other forms. These abstractions, often minimal in that they evolve around a set of limitations ie; ‘dots or grids’, are also maximal in their excess, variety and assuredness of form. Like mood rings, they track the energy of the hand / mind relationship — sometimes heavy with the weight of the world, or bold and jubilant or light as a feather, while other times busy and frenetic.

The works evoke evidence of life in the present, as a constant, in Madansky’s variable itinerant life —in New York, Istanbul, Athens, Toronto, Jerusalem, Warsaw, Wyoming, Rome, St. Petersburg, Taos. Underneath this reading there is an undeniable tug or a pull, towards facing the unknown, towards facing it unflinchingly with a total ‘surrender’ as the quote by Agnes Martin would have it. The hand surrenders to a form of writing that leads inwards and outwards and occasionally off the edges of the paper or wood base, creating, in many cases, a frisson between stillness and movement.

Color has always proven to be an important aspect of the drawings and paintings. In some works, color emerges as a kind of haze or atmosphere upon which the dots or grids lay. For instance in one series, hues of pale yellow, jade green, or pink flesh tones shimmer beneath the marks offering a kind of aquatic colorfield where the bead-like marks can rise and float. In other ‘dots’, color carries the movement of the eye in a game of hide and seek – some dots blaring while others receding as if we were watching the effects of night traffic through the droplets of rain on a window pane.

While producing grids or ‘hand-drawn straight lines’, posture, breath and hand, work in tandem for the line to release effortlessly. Rather than insist on the grids of art historical canons that identify ‘the rational order’, these grids feel more like a spider might have spun them for shelter. They are at once firm, yet nearly immaterial. The hidden matrix of sentience could be a grid, or a string of beads, we can only speculate.

For over three decades, Madansky’s drawings and paintings have acted as a sort of diary of moods and states of mind; a catalogue of embodied and performative aesthetics,  intrinsic and extrinsic calculations and coincidences, at once indefatigably concrete yet fluidly ephemeral in spirit.

— Regine Basha, January 2025

Regine Basha is a curator, writer, consultant dedicated to creative experimentation across disciplines. For Basha, no two projects are alike—her approach considers the specific context of a situation to inform the production of, or engagement with, contemporary artwork.