In an exhibition drawn from the Estate of Craig Kauffman, the Frank Lloyd Galley has on view a selection of works from a formative period in the Los Angeles artist's career. Pre-dating his well-known works in acrylic plastic, these pieces demonstrate Kauffman's development of the broken, calligraphic line he would use for decades, as well as his powerful abstract imagery.
The 12 drawings by Craig Kauffman, dated from 1958 to 1961, have never been shown before. The Estate of Craig Kauffman, following extensive conservation and study, has recently released this group of works on paper. The six drawings from 1958 show clear parallels to Kauffman's paintings of the same period, which were exhibited in his legendary one-person show at Ferus Gallery.
The remaining six drawings are part of a portfolio that Kauffman kept with him during his travels to Paris, Copenhagen, and Ibiza from 1959 to 1961. Kauffman recalled those works in an oral interview with Michael Auping in 1976. Asked about the composition of these pieces, the artist stated "…they went on with a very, very quick kind of drawings, where they almost came out being like Zen drawings. That's sort of the final stage they went through. They were really quick kinds of things. I really couldn't transfer those into anything else at the time at all. They were that finally. I was drawing a triangle in a circle in about one second, and that was it."