Drew Shiflett

[2][3] These handmade, hybrid works, which she terms "constructed drawings," offer subtle examinations of surface, structure and texture through their attention to materials, intuitive processes, and loose patterning.

[27][5] In the first half of her career, she produced reliefs and sculptures made of wood, repurposed paper products, cloth, Styrofoam, polyester stuffing and papier-mâché, among other materials.

[27][5] Critics have related her art to the minimalist works of Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Alan Shields, as well as to post-minimalist and feminist artists that employ self-invented processes based in the craft and domestic realms, such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou and Ruth Asawa.

[7][5] In the first two decades of her career, Shiflett produced a wide range of three-dimensional work, including large reliefs, boat- or coffin-like structures, and intricate constructions likened to "mythical worlds or interior architectures"[25] and "bricolage landscapes.

[33][27][29] Critic Nancy Princenthal elaborated on this quality, writing, "Though Shiflett's additive process is slow and laborious, its object is not settled contours or stable mass but rather rough-hewn forms that seem as structurally and psychologically fluid as a contemporary city.

[7][8][5] She then painstakingly draws delicate grids of tremulous, repeated marks, lines and horizontal color bands on the structures (using graphite, ink, Conté crayon or watercolor), which coalesce into translucent, rhythmic scrims of soft organic geometry.

[12][7] Raphael Rubinstein observed, "Her symphonies of whites—accented with sepias, grays and, crucially, the shadows cast by the cross-laid strips of paper or canvas—place no interfering substance, no distracting color between our eyes and the raw materials.

"[5] While abstract, the constructed drawings vary widely in their allusions (e.g., Untitled #98, 2023); among those discussed are architectural tableaux (e.g., colonnades, doorways or arches), landscapes, woven materials and layered strata of geological time.

[5] In 2009, dArt International compared the obsessively sprawling demarcations—loosely sectioned by underlying geometric shapes—in Shiflett's exhibition at Lesley Heller to bits of ancient tapestry or Greco-Roman ruins (e.g., a coliseum, bridge or water conduit) parched by sun and time.

"[4] Reviews of subsequent shows at Guild Hall Museum (2011) and Lesley Heller (2012, 2017) expanded on these themes, noting the work's mode of marking time in ways that suggested timelessness and language.