Alice Attie

born 1950 in New York City

lives and works in New York City

My works embrace the delicate process of mark-making that often begins with the minuscule and gradually grows to form and reform works that are both abstract and formal at the same time.”

read inGerman

Alice Attie received a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature and an M.F.A. in Poetry and taught literature throughout the New York area before turning her attention to her artwork. In 2015 and in 2023 she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant.

Alice Attie’s ink drawings involve the minuscule. They often explore the territory between writing and drawing, where the two overlap. Her drawings are meditations in ink that allow tiny marks to accumulate over long sustained periods of time. Engaging repetition, rhythm and gradual change, she allows words, figures, numbers and images to accrue and grow on the paper. When presenting a landscape of numbers or letters or of a language that is not real, she is inspired to push and suspend meaning, allowing it to slip into visual abstraction.

Attie has attended seminars in physics and philosophy at Columbia University for a period of several years. “Class Notes” is a series of drawings, each of which was created within the time frame of a single class period. Taking notes in class, Attie re-inscribes the lectures as drawings; they became visual analogues to the intellectual adventures that Attie finds herself drawn to. The tenuous distinction between drawing and writing is invoked, and as the lines of these two merge and collaborate, they seem to stand for something entirely other.

Her interest in the theories and concepts of advanced physics, for instance, is not distinct from her curiosity about the mathematical ciphers themselves; their strange ineluctable beauty suggests, but never explicates, their meaning. While any language may be inaccessible on one level, it may be captivating and inspiring as it is re-figured and embraced on another.

Philosophy lectures, on Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and the Philosophy of Islam also inspire the work that marks and often embodies some of the very dilemmas that philosophy addresses. In an ongoing body of work, inspired by the late works of the writer/philosopher Michel Foucault, Attie takes the phrase “Take Care of Yourself” (taken from the teachings of the ancient Greeks) to the drawing page - to form a landscape of endless inscription and abstraction. There is a play between the tangible and the intangible, the physical and the metaphysical, the miniscule and the grand. The tangling and untangling of strands, moving between what is legible and what is illegible, are what enthralls Attie. As she engages that tension, the drawings become wondrous explorations of ambiguity and interpretive possibility.

Atties photographs and works on paper are among other in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Jewish Museum, all in New York; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work is also in many major collections including the Margulies Collection, the JoAnn Hickey Collection, the Jorge M. and Darlene Pérez Collection, Miami, the Maxine & Stuart Frankel Foundation, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the Werner Kramasky Collection, the Doon Arbus Collection, and the Neil Selkirk Collection.

Alice Attie has published the following books of poems: These Figures Lining the Hills, 2015 (Seagull Books/University of Chicago); Under the Aleppo Sun, 2018 (Seagull Books/University of Chicago); Bending into the Light, 2022 (Seagull Books/University of Chicago). Maybe will be published in 2025 by Seagull Books/University of Chicago. Her book of photographs documenting the changing face of Harlem, Harlem on The Verge, was published in 2001 by Quantluck Lane/W.W.Norton Press.