Untitled

Untitled

Al Held

1970

graphite

From the collection of Museum of Modern Art

About this work

This drawing is all sharp lines and flat shapes. Squares, rectangles, and odd angles overlap in a messy, stacked way. Some lines are thick, others thin, but everything is just pencil on paper—no color, no shading. The forms don’t look real; they’re more like a puzzle or a diagram gone wild. The artist didn’t try to make it look like anything familiar. Instead, the lines twist and bump into each other, almost like a building exploded into pieces. It’s all about the edges and how they clash. If you like this, look up Al Held next—he made lots of work like this.

More by Al Held

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