Barry Le Va’s drawings have always been as significant as his sculptures and installations. These different mediums are mutually dependent and can be understood as existing in a structural, dialectic relationship. Drawing for Le Va, in addition to being a purely practical activity, is a form of thinking that offers the opportunity to concentrate on specific ideas, to alter and further develop them, as he himself has said. As such, he continues in the classical western tradition that since the Renaissance has perceived the “disegno”, the artist’s sketch, as depicting the actual artistic act. Le Va later realized many of these ideas in three-dimensions, and it is particularly in these pieces that it becomes clear how much the principles of the processual, the transitory, and the accidental manifest themselves in both the drawings and the sculptures. Since 1987 Galerie Fred Jahn has been associated with the artist through numerous projects and publications.
