The four untitled ink drawings dated “Marzo 1978,” present Elena Asins at a moment of distilled clarity. The set reads as a concise cycle of variations in which straight, exact lines articulate families of irregular polygons. The drawings occupy modest portions of the sheet, leaving generous reserves of white that function as measured intervals rather than empty background. With line alone, Asins builds a syntax that invites the eye to parse junctions, pauses, and directional cues.

These works sit at the core of Asins’s lifelong project to treat geometry as language and drawing as method. Her formation in semiotics and her participation in Madrid’s Centro de Cálculo shaped a practice grounded in rules, permutation, and serial thought. In 1978 she tests a generative premise: a skewed pentagonal module is propagated through rotations, adjacencies, and interruptions. Each sheet explores a different orchestration of the same structural vocabulary, which anticipates the larger paper suites of the early 1980s and the later “canons” in space.

The quartet demonstrates how small graphic decisions yield structural consequences. A single new segment becomes a hinge, a cluster of parallel strokes creates a directional field, an open edge suspends motion and announces a pause. At times the sequence hints at an underlying diagonal armature, at others the scaffolding withdraws and only joints remain. The grid is absent, yet an implicit tiling logic lets the forms seem to advance beyond the paper’s edge, which gives the drawings a sense of quiet continuation.

Asins’s commitment to structure places her in a rich conversation with peers who made the line both subject and instrument. With Gego she shares the belief that structure is an event unfolding in time, although Gego embraced sag, contingency, and the pull of gravity, while Asins favored planar discipline and rule-bound intervals. With Agnes Martin she shares devotion to repetition and restraint, yet the two diverge in tone. Martin’s touch registers as a meditative tremor, while Asins cultivates a taut vector that reads as propositional logic. All three helped redefine authority within postwar abstraction by proving that rigor and intimacy can inhabit the same field.

For the Robledo-Palop Collection, the present set offers a lucid entry into Asins’s oeuvre and a touchstone for the history of women’s contributions to geometric and systems art in Europe and the Americas. The drawings are rigorous without being hermetic and accessible without giving up complexity. No mathematics is required to enjoy them. One can simply follow how lines meet, part, and rejoin, and recognize that meaning resides in the rules that permit such unfolding. In these four sheets, drawing is not preparation. It is the site of invention, and the place where Asins shows how a structure thinks.

Provenance

Private collection, Spain
Acquired from the above

Exhibitions

Elena Asins, Soledad Sevilla, Galería Carteia, Algeciras, March 10 – 22, 1978.

Minimal Means: Concrete Inventions in the US, Brazil and Spain, Zeit Contemporary Art, New York, January 24 – March 16, 2019.

Alicante, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante – MACA, Long-term Loan, 2019 – 2025.

El rumor del viento es un silbido infatigable. Elena Asins, Alicante, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante – MACA, February 17 – May 28, 2023. Curated by Rosa M. Castells.