FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact • Kiley Brodeur, Marketing and Communications Associate
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Sarah Vanderlip: Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings
Winner of the Marjorie Schiele Prize
September 29–December 9, 2012
(Cincinnati, OH – August 17, 2012)
Shimmering outlines of buildings hover in Sarah Vanderlip’s graphite and silvered Mylar
drawings entitled Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings at the Cincinnati Art Museum September
29–December 9, 2012. Vanderlip is the inaugural winner of the Marjorie Schiele Prize, and
here uses architectural drawings to stretch the limitations of sculpture, drawing, and space. The
exhibition features five large format works, some approaching thirteen by seven feet in size.
“Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings underscores the hybridized and expanded field
of contemporary art today,” states James Crump, Chief Curator at the Cincinnati Art
Museum. “Vanderlip’s works strongly suggest sculpture’s relationship with drawing and
painting and architecture, and this artist’s particular penchant to move back and forth between
two- and three-dimensionality.”
A sculptor by training, possessing an MFA from Yale University, Vanderlip’s work exploits the
relationships that exist between media. She began this series of drawings in 2006, ten years
after her architect father’s death, by drawing his original architectural drawings, plans, and
elevations from the 1960s and 1970s with silvered Mylars. Drawings for Sculptures of Buildings
creates visual dilemmas, for as viewers we inhabit these drawings (buildings) with our own
reflections and at the very same time we inhabit the gallery space. Unlike a mirror, the silvered
Mylar makes our reflection ambiguous; the displaced light reflecting from the surface of these
hanging objects creates an illusory space that does not physically exist and yet it is present,
made kinetic, and three-dimensional.
The Marjorie Schiele Prize is a triennial competition that honors the work and legacy of
Marjorie Schiele, a Cincinnati artist whose generous bequest established the Prize. The
international juried competition was open to living artists who present a vision or model for
transforming our present reality by stretching the limitations of painting and sculpture. The
jurors that selected Vanderlip as the inaugural Marjorie Schiele Prize winner included Claudia
Gould, Director, Jewish Museum (New York); Max Hollein, Director, Städel Museums (Frankfurt,
Germany); and Cincinnati Art Museum Director, Aaron Betsky.