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Collection Spotlight: Bruce Conner, #113, 1970

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A textured black surface with two concentric white circles at the center. The area inside the circles appears rough and cracked, creating a pattern that resembles shattered glass or a mosaic.

Artist: Bruce Conner (American, 1933 – 2008)
Title: #113
Date: 1970
Medium: Offset lithograph on paper
Dimensions: 20 3/16 × 14 1/4 in.
Credit: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of The Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, 2025.1.6

From January 5 to February 1, 2026, a number of Bruce Conner’s works will be on view in The Living Room at The Block Museum of Art.

Dense, meticulous black marks form maze-like patterns, shapes, and interplays of light and dark. In this abstract print, artist Bruce Conner has rendered organic forms with technical precision. The work may evoke a range of familiar associations, inviting reflection on the act of perception itself. Do you see shapes, shades, and lines? Or do you see a thick forest canopy? A shattered phone screen? A microscopic tissue sample? A glimpse of the cosmos? Or something else?

Based on Conner’s felt-tip ink drawings from the mid–late 1960s, these prints showcase the artist’s exacting and obsessive approach to drawing and willingness to experiment with materials. In the 1960s, felt-tip ink had only recently become widely available, and it was prone to fading. Thus, Conner’s time-consuming drawings—some of which took several months to complete—disappeared quickly.

In response, Conner began to photograph some of his drawings. He then worked with commercial lithographers at Kaiser Graphics in Oakland, California, to transfer the images to lithographic plates and print them to his exact specifications. Through this printmaking process, Conner was able to make these fleeting handmade drawings permanent as well as more widely accessible and commercially viable. Yet, Conner liked to playfully introduce new problems into his practice. Even as he was working to preserve and circulate some of his detailed drawings as lithographs, he allowed other felt-tip ink drawings to fade away completely.

Conner was a relentless innovator and experimented across genres, techniques, and mediums. In addition to printmaking, he worked in collage, filmmaking, performance, and photography. He often played the role of provocateur and at times rejected the label of “artist.” Throughout his career, he challenged conventions and playfully questioned the nature of materials and artistic practice.

While Conner is widely known for his assemblages and his groundbreaking experimental film A Movie (1958), these prints reflect a meditative and meticulous approach to abstraction. The intricate, monochromatic forms demonstrate his technical precision and sustained attention, producing a rhythmic interplay of lines and shapes that can feel mesmerizing, even hypnotic.

The Block Museum’s collection has a concentration in 20th-century printmaking encompassing a range of genres, techniques, print studios, geographic locations, and artistic movements. Conner’s offset lithographs introduce new perspectives on abstraction and strengthen the museum’s holdings of postwar American art, particularly work associated with the countercultural energies of the 1960s and 1970s. Through works like #113, students and visitors are invited to slow down, look closely, and consider how perception, material experimentation, and reproduction shape meaning. The print reflects Conner’s paradoxical practice—balancing control and dissolution, permanence and disappearance—and underscores his persistent challenge to artistic conventions.

–Text based on acquisition research by Corinne Granof, Academic Curator

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