# What Will You See in Jasper Johns’s Recent Drawings at Matthew Marks? By Marius Pașculea | 2026-11-02 HTML version: https://antre.art/blog/jasper-johns-recent-drawings-matthew-marks-what-to-see/ > Jasper Johns's Recent Drawings opens at Matthew Marks on November 5: twelve new drawings by the 96-year-old artist, built from Shrinky Dinks, skeletons and The Seasons. Dates, hours. ## Short answer *Jasper Johns: Recent Drawings* opens at Matthew Marks Gallery, 526 West 22nd Street, with a reception on Wednesday, November 4, from 6 to 8 PM; the show runs November 5, 2026 through January 23, 2027. It presents twelve drawings made in the last two years by the most influential living American artist. ## Key facts - **Who:** Jasper Johns (b. 1930), the American painter, sculptor and printmaker whose flags, targets and numbers reset postwar art. - **What:** *Recent Drawings* — twelve works on paper from 2024 to 2026, including *Untitled* (2024), India ink and watercolor over etching. - **Where:** Matthew Marks Gallery, 526 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. - **When:** November 5, 2026 – January 23, 2027; opening reception Wednesday, November 4, 6–8 PM. - **Hours:** Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM. Admission is free. ## What will you see? Twelve drawings in which Johns, at 96, keeps working through the private vocabulary of his late art. Eight carry small images along their top edge taken from a drawing he made fifteen years ago on Shrinky Dinks, the children's plastic that shrinks by about 60 percent when heated. Those tiny transfers gather his familiar motifs: the silhouette of a boy first seen in *The Seasons* (1986), a Rubin's vase built from two self-portrait profiles, the sign-language alphabet, and a figure after Picasso's *Reclining Nude* of 1938. In three further drawings Johns returns to *The Seasons* and places a skeleton holding a skull where his own shadow once stood, turning the picture into a memento mori. The sheet the gallery reproduces, *Untitled* (2024), layers India ink and watercolor over etching at 24⅕ x 27¾ inches. ## Why do these drawings matter? Johns has treated drawing as a thinking medium for seven decades, and the late works compress an entire career into portable form: the boy, the vase, the alphabet and the skeleton recur the way flags and targets once did. Seeing twelve of them together is the closest thing to reading his notebook in public. A show of this scale is also what a [commercial contemporary art gallery](https://antre.art/blog/what-is-a-commercial-contemporary-art-gallery/) can do at its best: give a single, quiet body of work the whole room. ## How do you visit? Matthew Marks is at 526 West 22nd Street in Chelsea, open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM, with free entry. The reception on Wednesday, November 4, from 6 to 8 PM opens all three of the gallery's new shows at once: Johns at 526, Wade Guyton's new sculpture at 522, and *101 Drawings*, three centuries of works on paper, at 523 West 24th Street. Reading one image slowly pays off in a show like this; our guide on [how to look closely at a single work](https://antre.art/blog/how-to-look-at-manuel-alvarez-bravo-photograph/) works just as well for drawings. ## FAQ ### When does Jasper Johns: Recent Drawings open? The reception is Wednesday, November 4, 2026, from 6 to 8 PM; the exhibition runs November 5 through January 23, 2027. ### Does it cost anything? No. Entry to Matthew Marks Gallery is free. ### What are the hours? Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM. ### What are the Shrinky Dinks in the drawings? Small images along the top of eight sheets, transferred from a fifteen-year-old drawing Johns made on Shrinky Dinks plastic, which shrinks by about 60 percent when heated. They compress his best-known late motifs into miniature. ## About Antre Antre is building an app that gives artworks their context, starting with New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Join the waiting list at antre.art. ## Sources - Matthew Marks Gallery, exhibition page for *Jasper Johns: Recent Drawings*: dates, reception, address and the reproduced drawing. - On View, November gallery guide: show contents, motifs and the two neighboring openings. More context: our guides to [Ouattara Watts's new show at Karma, opening the same week](https://antre.art/blog/ouattara-watts-karma-chelsea-new-york-what-to-see/) and [Yoshitomo Nara's first show with David Zwirner](https://antre.art/blog/yoshitomo-nara-david-zwirner-new-york-what-to-see/). ## Be first when Antre opens. Join the waiting list for Antre, the adaptive cultural mediation app for Art Explorers, with hyper-personalized cultural context for every artwork, and Antre Art Voice, for galleries, artist-run spaces, artists and curators. One email at launch. Email addressJoin the waiting listCompanyI agree to receive an Antre launch email. I can withdraw anytime. [Privacy Policy](/privacy-policy/).