In the same gallery with string art and postmodern bric-a-brac, a visit to the Hirshhorn’s third floor will now reveal the intricacy of contemporary drawing when it meets all-out boring honest to goodness work. From the same art student friends you’ve heard wax endlessly on about Art School Confidential and how “Drawing dude, that’s the new painting,” comes blabbing praise for the uncool, unneurotic, even chubby Marco Maggi. But this time they are dead right.

At his recent “Artist at Work” talk, Maggi appeared bespectacled and careful, akin to an owl with obscene drawing talent. His mediums are mundane; carved apples, a roll of foil, laserjet paper. His minute focus and accurate hand work time (hours to months) in to simple objects. In the Hirshhorn’s soon to be acquired installation Hotbed, Maggi canals architectural models for moonbases abstracted from an office cubicle’s reams of paper. From the floor he raises tiny interconnected lines and loops cut from the surface of 24,500 sheets with shadows as significant as the x-acto-cut forms.