Over the last 40 years, the 68-year-old American artist Scott Covert has traversed cemeteries around the world, eluding groundskeepers while adding to his collection of gravestone rubbings: names as disparate as Elsa Schiaparelli, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Baum, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Truman Capote, not to mention some of the world’s most notorious murderers and mourned victims (for instance, the Clutter family of Kansas). Covert’s method is simple. On a piece of paper, with oil-wax crayons, he etches the letters and numbers he finds on headstones and markers. Some he does delicately; others get more pressure. Later, Covert collages these transcriptions in drawings and oil paintings, creating disembodied realms of intermingled souls and ghostly celebrity. This exhibition of his rubbings at the London-based gallery Studio Voltaire is Covert’s first solo presentation outside the U.S. —E.C.