Works on paper aren’t as sedate as they once were, Marsha Mateyka Gallery’s “On Paper” demonstrates. This eight-artist survey includes some conventional prints and drawings but also work by upstarts who burn patterns into paper, draw with hot glue or cut, fold and paint tar paper.

Like most Mateyka group shows, this includes vintage work by Gene Davis and Sam Gilliam. Davis’s 1981 “Sky Code” is an intricate drawing that appears to represent a cryptographic method; Gilliam’s 1996 “As Kids Go” is an exuberant monoprint, individualized with collaged additions. Athena Tacha, another regular, contributes “S-Strings”, a glowing orb of silver hot-glue strands on a black backdrop.

Intricate Howard Hodgkin prints from the 1970’s and ‘80s, made with a variety of techniques, contrast meticulous line with freehand coloring. The largest, the black-and-white “Two to Go,” is a sort of rectangular spiral, softened with gouache in four shades of gray.

Even more architectural are Sheila Rotner’s three “Root Rectangles,” constructions of tar paper, sand, rivets and paint. They seem to have been made out of materials from a construction site and suggest models for extreme-angled buildings. The structures could be erected next to the swooping ziggurat depicted in “Probability Pyramid,” a lithograph by eco-installation artist Agnes Denes.

Denes’s image has an organic quality that’s even more pronounced in Andrea Way’s “Twelve Pools,” a silkscreen derived from the splashes that result when droplets of blue water hit small puddles. Also working from the small gesture to a larger design, Kathleen Kucka scorches hundreds of concentric marks into paper, then adds clouds of soft color with oil sticks. This approach, too, unifies the geometric and the natural. The burn holes in one of her elegant pieces follow a nearly regular orbit, but in another, the voids pirouette around a central point like a flock of birds.

On Paper: Howard Hodgkin, Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis, Sheila Rotner, Andrea Way, Athena Tacha, Agnes Denes, Kathleen Kucka On view through Jan. 23 at Marsha Mateyka Gallery, 2012 R St., NW.
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