24 | Baseman and Mills | Selected Works
On View | April 11 - May 16, 2026
Studio light | space presents selected works by Marc Baseman and Wes Mills, artists whose practices have developed in conversation since their arrival in Taos in 1991. Both have sustained careers of considerable scope. This exhibition focuses on the particular intensity of their drawing practice.
Baseman's drawings are not compositions in any conventional sense. They are cosmologies. Compressed into a few square inches, each work constitutes a complete world governed by its own internal logic, its own spatial grammar, its own hierarchy of forms. The materials are not incidental. The Japanese pencil and the particular way it is sharpened informs the work. The found paper, with its own history and surface, shapes what is possible before a line is drawn. Each piece leads to the next, the practice self-generating, accumulative, without a predetermined destination.
Installation view: l-r Marc Baseman Heaventree (preliminary) Heaventree | Wes Mills No Title
Writing about what he calls the minor, curator Chris Sharp identifies the rarest quality in contemporary art as the capacity for world building: the development of a pictorial language so fully formed and so irreducibly personal that a viewer must learn it on its own terms, submitting to the work rather than applying any ready-made framework to it. Sharp draws on Joyce and Beckett as analogies, artists whose work does not meet you halfway. Baseman belongs in that company. His visual language accumulates across decades of drawing, absorbing folk sources, architectural fragments, mythological residue, and private iconography into something that cannot be recuperated into any existing critical category. The work is too strange, too complete, too much itself. That unclassifiability is not a limitation. It is the condition of its power.
Wes Mills works at the other end of the register from Baseman, but with equivalent conviction. Where Baseman accumulates, Mills eliminates. A pencil line, white powdered pigment applied by hand, a sheet of paper whose surface is as much subject as support. The decisions are few. Each one is visible. Mills has described the effect he is after in terms of volume: turn the radio up too loud and you stop listening, but lower it and attention sharpens. His drawings operate at that threshold. They do not declare themselves. They wait.
The closest precedent is Lee Ufan, whose Mono-ha practice placed the single mark against an undisturbed field and insisted that the emptiness was not absence but pressure. Fred Sandback strung a single length of yarn across a room and the line defined what surrounded it rather than what it was. Morton Feldman composed at near silence so that each sound arrived as an event. Mills works from the same understanding. The spaciousness in these drawings is exhilarating. So is the courage it takes to leave it alone.
Both artists have chosen concentration over expansion, intimacy over dominance. For each, drawing functions as a method of inquiry.
Marc Baseman 2023 landfall Graphite on paper 4 x 3 inches
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Marc Baseman was born in Philadelphia in 1965 and moved to Taos County, New Mexico, in 1991. His work is held in major collections and has been exhibited at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, 5 Point Gallery in Santa Fe, James Kelly Contemporary in Santa Fe, Edward Tyler Nahem in New York and Madrid, and institutions across the country. Each drawing leads to the next. The practice has no predetermined destination.
Wes Mills No Title 2025 Graphite and oil paint on panel 12 inches square
Wes Mills was born in Tucson in 1960 and arrived in Taos in 1991. His drawings and prints are held in major American collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Harwood Museum of Art. Mills has exhibited nationally and internationally, with work featured in museums and galleries across the United States and Europe. Mills writes: "It is in the nature of drawing, a practice that, at times, can be seen as simple, becomes a passage to something of purity and beauty. A light breeze had been moving a little twig back and forth in the sand. The soft and delicate marks created by the repeated movement momentarily held me there with some sort of tenderness, a heightened awareness to the quietness of my surroundings. If my drawing could hold me in this way, I would be happy."
Installation view l-r Wes MIlls paintings, Marc Baseman ghost dog and drawing
Chris Sharp, "Theory of the Minor," Mousse Magazine, 2017.