This event was part of On Drawings 2024 programming

Michael Findlay, Director of Acquavella Galleries, and Jacob El Hanani, artist, in a conversation moderated by Elizabeth Pergam, Co-Chair of The Society for the History of Collecting and founder of its Americas Chapter.

“Drawings” and “works on paper” are often used interchangeably; Jacob El Hanani’s practice, most recently seen in his fifth solo show Drawing on Canvas at Acquavella, challenges that restrictive definition. Likewise, his work defies the reductive binaries of representation/abstraction, text/image, and microscopic/macroscopic. How does challenging the norms of artistic production impact an artist’s relationship with collectors? What is the role of the artist’s gallery in guiding collector’s appreciation of his work? Join us for a conversation with Jacob El Hanani and Michael Findlay, moderated by Elizabeth Pergam as part of The Drawing Foundation’s On Drawings, 2024, presented by The Society for the History of Collecting.

Jacob El Hanani (b. 1947), was born in Morocco and received his artistic training at the Avni School of Fine Arts, Tel Aviv, and the École des Beaux Arts, Paris, before settling in New York in the early 1970s. He has been showing with Acquavella since 2015 and his work is in many New York collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Jewish Museum, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Michael Findlay, Director of Acquavella Galleries, has been a key figure in the New York art world since his arrival in 1964 and his first gallery job with Richard Feigen. A poet and author, his most recent book, Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man: New York in the Sixties (Prestel, 2024), is a lively account of the gallerists, artists, and collectors who made the City the center of contemporary art.

Elizabeth Pergam is Co-Chair of The Society for the History of Collecting and founder of its Americas Chapter. Her edited volume, Drawing in the Twenty-First Century: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Practice (Ashgate, 2014) explores the expanded field of contemporary drawing.

Presented in partnership with The Society for the History of Collecting

This event is sponsored by Master Drawings New York

Image: Jacob El Hanani, Quadric Urban Landscape (detail), 2023, ink on gessoed canvas, 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm). © Jacob El Hanani, Courtesy Acquavella Galleries