Rather than recognizing his works as fixed products, Conner consistently edited or repurposed his own drawings, sculptures and films. Emerging from the West Coast countercultural movement, he restlessly explored mysticism and spirituality, punk rock and psychedelia, while tenaciously rejecting American jingoism and consumerism. In 2016, Conner was the subject of the major monographic survey “BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid. Drawings and prints of later years are credited to “Anonymous” and “Anonymouse”, two of several alter egos invented by Conner to manipulate the idea of artistic identity and authorship. Conner’s DECK drawings speak to the artist’s pioneering peripatetic yet iterative practice. His use of disparate appropriated and recycled materials parallel the techniques used to make the films and assemblages for which he is well known. His diverse range of films, collages, and sculptural assemblages are defined by the artist’s fascination with the grotesque and mortality. A would-be collaboration with his friend, the poet Michael McClure (1932–2020), DECK was conceived of as a set of cards, each printed with a lithographic reproduction of single inkblot on one side and a pair of words on the reverse. A decade later, these collages became the source material for a series of photo etchings produced with Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press in Oakland, CA and published in 1971-73. His work has been included in major exhibitions, such as the historic 1961 “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art. Bruce Conner. In the mid-1970s and continuing sporadically for the rest of his career, Conner produced inkblot drawings of startling variety and innovation: grids of small, calligraphic shapes executed by blotting small puddles of ink between the folds of accordion-pleated sheets of paper. Paula Cooper Gallery’s presentation of DECK drawings marks the first time these works have been shown as a group. The retinal effect of his starkly monochromatic drawings of the 1960s and 1970s is achieved through the use of densely woven lines, creating highly complex shifting patterns. The discrete inkblots were created in 1975 for Conner’s unrealized DECK project. Bruce Conner was an American conceptual artist and member of the San Francisco Beat movement. He received his BFA at Nebraska University in 1956 and continued his studies with scholarships at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the University of Colorado. Conner’s immersive felt-tip drawing process took on a performative aspect as the artist spent continuous hours making them, never lifting pen from paper in order to produce a graphically uninterrupted line. E-Catalogue: Bruce Conner, Afterimage, The Prints of Bruce Conner, 2012 In the mid-1970s and continuing sporadically for the rest of his career, Conner produced inkblot drawings of startling variety and innovation: grids of small, calligraphic shapes executed by blotting small puddles of ink between the folds of accordion-pleated sheets of paper. Throughout his fifty-year career, Conner embraced change in endless forms, producing stunningly inventive works grounded in a rigorous structural precision. An outlier in the exhibition, the imagery harkens to Conner’s groundbreaking films of the 1970s such as Crossroads, 1976. Middle banner: Bruce Conner, TRIO 52-19-1 (detail), 1975, ink, each card: 6 x 4 in. Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was born in McPherson, Kansas and moved to San Francisco in the late 1950s where he became a pivotal figure in the Beat scene of poets, writers, artists and performers. E-Catalogue: Bruce Conner, Dennis Hopper One Man Show , 2016. Believing hand-drawn and inked lithography interfered with the precision of his imagery, the artist chose a commercial offset process, flouting print world conventions by using photomechanical rather than fine art printing. The process, however, allowed him to amend flaws in the original drawings and create improved compositions. Born in McPherson, Kansas, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was raised in Wichita where he attended Wichita University. The unwillingness in the mid-1960s of his Los Angeles dealer Nicholas Wilder to exhibit the work under another’s name, as well as Conner’s refusal to reveal his own identity, led to their relative obscurity during this time period. E-Catalogue: Bruce Conner, Afterimage, The Prints of Bruce Conner, 2012. Other prints relate to film projects or collage pieces, such as BOMBHEAD, originally conceived as a collage and later transferred and produced as an inkjet print. A would-be collaboration with his friend, the poet Michael McClure (1932–2020), DECK was conceived of as a set of cards, each printed with a single inkblot lithograph on one side and a pair of words on the reverse. Setting himself and his work in critical opposition to mainstream American society, versatile and restlessly inventive artist Bruce Conner was a key part of the San Francisco Beat scene in the late 1950s. One of the foremost American artists of the postwar era, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) worked across a vast range of media including drawing, sculpture, collage, painting, photography, printmaking, and film. The spectrum of complex patterns in these early DECK works illustrates Conner’s burgeoning experimentation and deft mastery of the medium. Created in the summer of 1975, Conner’s DECK drawings are some of the artist’s very first works in the INKBLOT series—one of his most expansive bodies of works. Conner experimented with intricate geometric drawings throughout his life, as in his Book Pages series (1967) which present sheets of paper almost entirely filled with continuous, wandering lines, as well as in his Rorschach-like inkblot drawings of the 1990s and 2000s. This led to the production of some one hundred prints, from small, single sheets to suites of up to twenty-five related panels (titled SET OF THREE, SET OF FOUR, etc.). His exhaustive variations in this technique resulted in myriad permutations of density and form. Shown here as a group for the first time, Conner’s DECK drawings speak to the artist’s pioneering peripatetic yet iterative practice. (40 x 34.3 cm) Inquire Born in McPherson, Kansas, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was raised in Wichita where he attended Wichita University. An intensely meticulous activity, his process began by carefully folding paper along parallel vertical lines. INKBLOT DRAWING AUGUST 4, 1975 (detail), 1975. ink. Interested in shifting personas and subverting traditional notions of authorship, Conner attributed this body of work to his friend and fellow Kansas native, Dennis Hopper. Images inspired by nature, Leaf September 11-December 7, 2001, and Dark Leaf, relate to elegiac drawings the artist made in response to the 9/11 attacks. frame: 13 1/4 x 21 1/4 in. Acting simultaneously as artwork and as foil for a larger conceptual project, this series is considered by many to be among Conner’s major works. Totemic and enigmatic, these rows of symmetrically arranged patterns read as documents scripted in a mysterious language. Another notable print series dating from 1971 is titled DENNIS HOPPER ONE MAN SHOW The genesis for this print project dates back to the late 1950s, when Conner began a series of paper collages using fragments of 19th-century engraved illustrations styled on those by French Surrealist Max Ernst. Active in all media, including painting, collage and assemblage, sculpture, graphic arts, filmmaking, and photography, Conner brought a radical and iconoclastic approach to art-making, questioning and rejecting ideals of artistic purity, style, and identity, as well as the market-driven dynamic of the art world. Conner’s collages depict a surreal, hallucinatory universe populated by images of flora and fauna, machine parts, and disembodied figures. Betsy Senior Fine Art is pleased to be the exclusive representative of the prints of Bruce Conner from the Conner Family Trust. Several of Conner’s DECK drawings introduce wispy, interconnected blots, while others are darkly inked and drawn with greater sharpness—like small, self-contained space invaders or hieroglyphics. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE is the artist’s first monographic museum exhibition in New York, the first large survey of his work in 16 years, and the first complete retrospective of his 50-year career. In 2000, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a retrospective of Conner’s work titled “2000 BC: THE BRUCE CONNER STORY, PART II,” which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the M.H. (33.7 x 54 cm), framed dimensions: 13 1/4 x 21 1/4 in. Art critic and curator Michael Smith understands Conner's mandalas and other drawings not only as visual products, but as "records of obsessive performances", during which Conner … frame: 15 3/4 x 13 1/2 in. Paula Cooper Gallery’s presentation of DECK drawings marks the first time these works have been shown as a group.