Zander Galerie Paris is pleased to present an exhibition of the five-part graphite drawing Commander Lowell by American artist Molly Springfield. Created in 2015 as part of her continuing series The Marginalia Archive and measuring over 4.5 meters in length, the work on paper explores the limits of reproduction, the translation of thought into writing, and the material conditions of reading. Through the processes of copying, annotation and transcription, Springfield investigates how meaning is mediated, altered and preserved.
Molly Springfield’s work centres on acts of reproduction and the question of how information changes through repeated transmission. Working from existing printed texts, she repeatedly photocopies source material, with each generation serving as the basis for the next. Through this accumulative process, words, annotations and traces of use are enlarged and transformed. Treating text as image rather than as language alone, Springfield allows new visual forms to emerge from the original document. Once a final composition has been established, she meticulously recreates it in graphite on paper. Letters and handwritten marks become abstract forms, partially detached from their initial function.
Rooted in the legacy of conceptual art and informed by artists such as Mel Bochner, who employed photocopying technologies as artistic tools, Springfield’s work approaches reproduction not as exact duplication, but as a process of transformation. Her work reflects on the shift from analogue to digital modes of communication while foregrounding the role of copying in the preservation and circulation of knowledge.
The large-scale work in this exhibition, Commander Lowell, is based on a marked copy of a poem by the American poet Robert Lowell from his 1959 autobiographic collection Life Studies. Developed through public submissions, The Marginalia Archivedraws on books marked by readers and accompanied by reflections describing their relationship to the text. In Commander Lowell, Springfield enlarges and isolates annotations and graphic interventions left in the margins of the poem. While these marks suggest a form of language, their meaning often remains legible only to their authors. Detached from their original context, the markings hover between personal notation and abstract image.
By foregrounding these traces of reading, Springfield challenges the notion of the printed text as fixed and stable. Instead, the book emerges as a site of accumulation, interpretation and projection. The Marginalia Archive ultimately reflects on the contingency of meaning and on subtle shifts that occur as information is transmitted from one form, medium or reader to another.
Molly Springfield (b. 1977) is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 MacDowell Fellow. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Drawing Center, New York; Hafnarborg Museum, Iceland; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Portland Museum of Art; and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. The artist lives and works in Washington, D.C