Geometric Designs with Facades 1964

This print of geometric facades was made by Stuart Egnal in 1964. Imagine the concentration, the focus it must have taken to make something so meticulous. It’s a real feat of vision and concentration. Egnal created a whole city by hand, using an intricate web of hatched lines. The marks create these buildings that are at once solid and dissolving. There’s a push-pull between structure and surface, between the architecture and the act of drawing. It makes me think about Piranesi, but it also feels like a precursor to the kind of image making you see in video games. What does it mean to build an architecture out of marks? I think it’s about the way the hand, the artist’s hand, can conjure and compose entire worlds. And when we look at this, we join the city, we complete it. It's a reminder that art thrives on uncertainty, with artists always in dialogue, building on each other's insights across generations.