Nancy Graves’s art is broadly inclusive and formally rigorous, addressing the permeability of the world with openness to the recombination of forms and subjects. Her sources include anything from botany to paleontology, from Jackson Pollock’s scattered canvases to classical and modernist sculpture. Rope Pull captures the colorful lyricism, rigorous intellect, and whimsical charm typical of Graves’s work from the mid 1980s. Her style represents an elegant fusion of art, the natural sciences, history, and culture as well as an exploration of the interchanges between the principles of abstraction and natural elements.