Marking Completion: The Status and Circulation of Drawings from the 15th Century to Today

When is a drawing complete, independent, or “finished?” Is the concept of completion a conscious decision made by the artist, or something that happens later, in the hands of collectors, dealers, curators, or algorithms? The aim of this workshop is to investigate when and whether drawings were considered “finished” and how that sense of completion is frustrated as drawings move between contexts from the fifteenth century to today. The workshop treats drawings as independent objects that circulate and accrue economic and emotional value, and generate knowledge across art, science, design, and technology.  Thus, drawings are understood here as sites of ongoing inquiry, experimentation, and reasoning, capable of generating unique forms of knowledge, visualization, and conceptual connection. Developed in dialogue with the research trajectories of the Medici Archive Project and the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” and their focus on processual and methodological approaches, this workshop treats “completion” not as a final state, but as a series of active thresholds. This workshop intends to focus on those moments when a drawing is judged, classified, circulated, or stabilized. The papers address how drawings shift status as they move between studios, museums, archives, markets, and digital platforms from the 1400s to today. How and when do drawings exceed their initial roles as studies, models, technical records, or designs to be treated as finished works or circulating images in their own right? What forms of knowledge, agency, gaps, new connections or authorship do drawings perform when disentangled from the artistic, technical, or scientific processes they were meant to support or contexts they emerged from? How do these shifting roles reshape the criteria by which a drawing is recognized as “complete,” or even as a drawing?