Matthew Marks Gallery opened three exhibitions on 4 November, led by Jasper Johns: Recent Drawings at its 526 West 22nd Street space in New York. The show runs to 23 January 2027 and gathers twelve drawings made over the past two years, all turning on motifs Johns has carried for decades: the silhouette of a young boy, a Rubin's vase, and the American Sign Language alphabet.

Several of the new works grow directly out of Johns's own prints. Three Untitled drawings from 2025 rework his 2019 etching of the same name, in which a skull-wielding skeletal figure stands amid art-making materials; in the new versions, acrylic and India ink almost, but not quite, paint the stick figures out. Another strand draws on Shrinky Dink 3, from 2011, with its nested, self-portrait-like motifs. The result is a show that rewards close looking, each sheet a palimpsest of earlier images.

Johns is now 96, and the exhibition is a reminder of how long his conversation with drawing has run. When his first solo show opened at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, the Museum of Modern Art bought several works on the spot. Nearly seven decades later, the new drawings show an artist still testing the same images, still finding something unresolved in them.

The same evening also opened Wade Guyton: Sculpture at the gallery, and 101 Drawings, a group show spanning Nayland Blake, Alex Da Corte, Willem de Kooning, Nicole Eisenman, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, Martin Puryear and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others. All three run to 23 January.