San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissions eighteen drawings by

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Ewan Gibbs to make a suite of eighteen drawings of San Francisco. These works are presented in the form of a solo exhibition at the museum, on view from January 16 through June 17, 2010, on the occasion of the institution's 75th anniversary. All eighteen works are acquired for the museum's permanent collection.

"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."
– Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, SFMOMA