By virtue of its being the most elemental form of mark-making, drawing is often the most intimate part of an artist’s oeuvre, whether it is preparatory, reflective or independent of any other body of work.

The more than three dozen recent drawings by Robert Gober, Roni Horn, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Ken Price, Charles Ray and Terry Winters, currently on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery on West 24th Street in New York, provide the perfect example.

Ranging from spontaneous and expressive sketches to laboriously articulated renderings, the work in the exhibition provides an insightful and rewarding peek into how major artists integrate drawing into their overall work.

Five new drawings of plants by Ellsworth Kelly follow the fluidly rendered natural forms he’s been creating since the mid-1960s. The sharp pencil lines that make up each stem or petal demonstrate his remarkable economy of line, just as the controlled and refined use of color distinguishes Kelly’s paintings.

Two new folios on hand-made paper by Brice Marden show the seamless integration of his drawings and paintings. For Marden, the expediency afforded by ink and gouache seems a way to explore compositional choices. Marked by a fluidity of movement, the drawings further emphasize the calligraphic elegance in Marden’s work, as in the branching, sinuous lines in this set of drawings.

Four new drawings by Jasper Johns make use of now familiar ideas of revision and repetition of formal elements. Playing with tonal nuances through the use of watercolor and graphite, the drawings revisit decorative and structural motifs found in Johns’ recent series of paintings.

Yet unlike the sometimes overly allusive quality in his paintings, there are few arcane elements in Johns’ new drawings to distract from their immediacy.

Through highlighting a variety of media—ink, graphite, watercolor—the work in the exhibition also shows drawing’s potential for heterogeneity (even if this common approach blurs the distinction between a work of paper and a drawing proper).

For example, Terry Winters, whose work ranges from painting to lithographs and woodcuts, uses graphite to create almost stamp-like motifs. Ken Price’s watercolors, on the other hand, are more illustrative than the graphic work that Winters’s drawings reflect.

The exhibition demonstrates not only the variety of media used in drawing, but the diverse ways in which it functions for artists. While small drawings by Robert Gober show the germ of his sculptural pieces, the brightly colored portrayals of flowers by Charles Ray take the viewer in an entirely different direction from the artist’s familiar real-as-surreal sculptures.

Part of the merit of the show lies in the way it skirts the bathetic side of the idiom, or how what is often merely a caprice is justified solely by being a drawing—with all the unfinished and unmediated implications. Instead, it solidifies the importance of drawing in these artists’ work while focusing on its intrinsic value as an expressive medium.

"Recent Drawings: Robert Gober, Roni Horn, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Ken Price, Charles Ray, Terry Winters" is on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery through Feb. 25.