Route One: Box Two: VIII, 2017

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Route One: Box Two: VIII, 2017

Artist McArthur Binion (American, born 1946)

Date2017

Dimensions96 × 72 in. (243.8 × 182.9 cm)

MediumOil stick, ink, and paper on board

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey

Object number

2018.2

Not on View

Label TextMcArthur Binion’s work combines formal, abstract rationality with the intensely personal and biographical. In this painting, meticulously painted lines form a grid subtly dividing the composition into two equal rectangles of different shades. But look closer and you might make out images of a house on the left and copies of Binyon’s birth certificate on the right, obscured under the intricate mesh of lines. The house, to which the series title Route One: Box Two refers, is the home in Macon, Mississippi where Binion was born in 1946 and lived until his family moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1951. As Binion notes, the inclusion of these elements is about “how do you make abstraction personal?” Binion’s grid is rich in references: the cultivated rows of cotton fields that his family, including his 4-year-old self, worked in Mississippi; quilts made by the women of the African American community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama; and the work of European Modern abstract artists like Piet Mondrian.Exhibition HistoryNew York, Galerie Lelong, 2017.