Len Lye’s career was marked by a lifelong fascination with movement and an aspiration to compose motion; the movement of the drawing hand was an important touchstone for his works in various media. In New York Lye is now well known for his animated experimental films. In the 1920s, however, Lye began to make what he termed “motion sketches”; abstract drawings that attempted to render the movement of his subjects, rather than their appearance. Motion Sketch reintroduces scholars and audiences in New York to Lye’s multidimensional practice specifically in relation to drawing. Describing his drawing practice in his own carefree prose, Lye said that doodling “cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn ‘twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper.” Lye’s kinesthetic approach to drawing—related to Surrealist automatism and anticipating aspects of Abstract Expressionism—also informed his practice in painting, photography, film, and sculpture. Not limited to works on paper; the exhibition instead reveals how Lye’s concept of "doodling" underpinned his approach to much of his work.

The exhibition includes a selection of paintings, drawings, and photograms, never before seen in the United States. In The Drawing Center’s Lab gallery, an extensive film program is presented on video, including such landmark films as Tusalava, 1929; A Colour Box, 1935; and Free Radicals, 1957/1979.