Bless This Press

Downtown print studio and exhibition space a83 has spent the past five years holding it down for a once-formidable strain of artistic production: architectural printmaking, a key component of the design process for decades as well as a once popular market for collectors, now rendered functionally obsolete by digital drafting programs. The gallery’s latest show, Architectural Drawing III, follows two previous installments in 2021 and 2023, all exploring the technical and creative possibilities of ink on paper in an increasingly dematerialized world. Together, they make a strong case for the power of the pen, the pencil, and the press, not just as media for creating attractive objets but for footloose experimentation.

Like the previous iterations, III features a remarkably diverse group of seven practices as
well as a correspondingly broad range of conceptual and visual approaches. From well-known New York office MOS, “Dropped Figures” is a sequence of six formal studies, regular geometric shapes in candylike ombre colors of extraordinary delicacy: Never did silk scre…