Mark Lombardi, the neo-conceptualist artist who until 1993 was known primarily as an Abstract painter, is renowned for his intricate graphite drawings featuring a web of narratives in a single composition. From a distance, each of Lombardi’s large-scale drawings—self-coined as “narrative structures”—look like astronomical diagrams, but upon close inspection the viewer can make out specific names of politicians, important businessmen, crime figures and federal organizations. In the present lot, the primary names circled are former President Bill Clinton, shipping conglomerate the Lippo Group, and Arkansas investment banker Jackson Stephens, all of whom were connected by a series of financial and political events which began in the 1980s and continued into Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Inspired by these events, Lombardi began his Bill Clinton, the Lippo Group and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock series in the late 1990s, to which the present lot belongs. Exploring the interaction of political, social and economic forces in the contemporary age, this series is perhaps even more relevant in today’s political climate. As Ken Johnson espoused of these works, “The airy, precise webs expanding up to four or five feet across suggest an evil order underlying apparent chaos…they exude a resonant poetry of paranoia. It's thrilling to contemplate the hidden, labyrinthine structures of real-world power that Mr. Lombardi so elegantly traces.” (Ken Johnson, “Art in Review; Mark Lombardi – Vicious Circles” in The New York Times, November 5, 1999, online)