Spanning from Johns's early gridded and
layered numbers
of the 1960s to the 2010 etching and aquatint Fragment
of a Letter — based on an excerpt
of a van Gogh missive and rendered in both stenciled
type and American Sign Language pictographs — these
puzzles compose a half century's exploration
of the complexities not just
of image making but
of representation itself.
Robert Smithson is interested in modern
types of industry, quarries and salt lakes, prehistoric
layers of sediment and
puzzling ruins
of ancient and modern civilisation.