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Show The Utah Arts Festival's EXHIBITION 1990: Contemporary Works On Paper "Like notes in a diary or a notebook, drawings are frequently direct notations made by the artist for himself alone, free of artificial elaboration or the excess finish that often impresses the uninitiated who might value a work of art in terms of the amount of labor involved rather than in terms of its power of expression." -Daniel Mendelowitz Works on paper, not only drawing as Mendelowitz relates above, often represent the most personal and purest expression of the visual artist. The works in Utah Arts Festival's EXHIBITION 1990, as you will see, offer few exceptions to this general observation. EXHIBITION 1990 is the second in a series of three surveys of Utah's contemporary visual artists curated by the Utah Arts Festival and supported by Geneva Steel at the historic Union Pacific Depot. Last year, twenty-three painters and this year twenty-three artists working on paper were selected to represent those artists working with contemporary issues. The Festival's intention is to acknowledge the quality of their work in a serious public forum and, like last year, younger emerging artists have been invited to exhibit along with the more mature, established artists one would expect to see. During visits to the artist' studios and galleries, work was selected to reflect the various media and the variety of individual approaches to making art. Works on paper are probably as old as paper itself. Oberlin College in Ohio owns a fine Egyptian line drawing, ink on papyrus, an illustration from the New Kingdom circa 1000 B.C. European pen and ink drawings illustrating the Bible date to A.D. 800. But it was in Renaissance Italy, in the 1400s, that drawing evolved to the state we practice today. In the mid- to late-1500s a group of Italian artists, called Mannerists, were the first to collect drawings and are credited with doing the first "master drawing" independent of preparatory sketches. So in less than 2500 years, artists found in the process of drawing that working on paper had rewards of its own - apart from its usefulness as a preparation for some more permanent work or as an illustration for text. In the early 1900s, Cubist, Dada and Surreal artists expanded the parameters of mixed-media with the introduction of collage (process of introducing not a representation of an object of image but the |