Paul Sietsema

Paul Sietsema’s ethereal drawings, sculptures, and films explore combinations of color, space, and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. For his third and newest project, Figure 3 (2008), Sietsema takes as his inspiration the precolonial ethnographic objects fo... Read more

Paul Sietsema’s ethereal drawings, sculptures, and films explore combinations of color, space, and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. For his third and newest project, Figure 3 (2008), Sietsema takes as his inspiration the precolonial ethnographic objects found in various locations—including Africa, Indo-Asia, and the South Pacific region of Oceania—that he has collected since 2001. He reimagines these objects through his own drawings and sculptures, then captures the sculptures on 16mm film; the results are flickering, mostly black-and-white moving images that slip between abstract and figurative representation. Paul Sietsema is the first New York exhibition of the artist’s most recent body of work, accompanied by selected works from MoMA’s collection, including the film Figure 3 and related drawings.