Ewan Gibbs: San Francisco

This suite of drawings, commissioned by SFMOMA, offers an evocative glimpse of San Francisco's urban landscape and landmarks. British artist Ewan Gibbs has translated photographs of the city into marks commonly used for knitting patterns — minuscule slashes and dots rendered in sharp pencil — to form a kind of visual code. The resulting images, recognizable from a distance, become more abstract and fleeting at close range. Gibbs's urban portraiture both reveals and obscures its subject matter, simultaneously capturing the many textures of San Francisco while keeping the city at a distance.

Ewan Gibbs
San Francisco