Drawing Documents in Extra City,Kunsthal Antwerpen

Rinus Van de Velde

Drawing Documents presents recent artistic projects that explore the medium of the drawing in its relation to memory and the representation of history. Parallel to the widespread current artistic concern with history that focuses on the politics of historical narratives, and the ambiguity of photographic or filmic documents, a renewed interest has emerged in drawing as a means of recording reality and relating to past events. Found somewhere between the genres of history painting, writing, and visual documents such as photography and film, the medium presents unique possibilities and asks particular questions concerning the reception of reality and historiography.

Drawing Documents explores how drawing establishes new relations between the imaginative and the evidentiary. The works bridge the visible and invisible, image and text, subjective desire and inscriptions of the real, authorship and witnessing, individual and collective memories, imaginaries and experiences. Drawings, this exhibition suggests, create a distinctive space that allows us to survey the condition of historical consciousness, particularly in relation to the image-economies of present-day mass media.

For Drawing Documents, Rinus Van de Velde creates a new series of wall drawings. Over the past years, Van de Velde has used a vast personal collection of images as templates for his drawings, combining them with textual fragments that introduce subjective experience into fragmentary narrative scenographies. Although the artist has long been working with a fictional Alter Ego, he has recently begun to approach historical figures and enter into an imaginary conversation with them through his work. Christine Meisner works both in film and drawing. Her work is based on extensive historical research and traveling, which is then cast into the form of essayistic video-works and series of deviated drawings. In the new works presented in this exhibition, she focuses on the history of slavery in the United States, creating topographic maps that explore fugitive routes and communication systems based on specific literary accounts. In his practice of painting and drawing, Xisco Mensua refers to poetic, literary and philosophic sources from the twentieth century, creating tableaus that mobilize transient layers of the historical imagination. Musician and cartoonist Peter Blegvad will be represented with his long-term project Imagined, Observed & Remembered, a series of what he calls comparative drawings, conceived as an inquiry into the role of the “mind's eye”. Here particular illustrations and objects are depicted first as imagined, then based on actual observation, and after a period of time, once again from memory. Ivan Grubanov presents a new series of drawings and paintings. In his work, Grubanov explores political historiography and puts to the test what specific modes of representation, such as the monument, contain, thus traversing the distance between official and personal histories. Florian Zeyfang’s Transmission Attempts is the only video-work in the exhibition. The black and white animation is based on a montage of scenes from films by Harun Farocki/Andrej Ujica, Jean-Luc Godard/Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huilliet.

19 November 2010 – 6 February 2011

Extra City, Kunsthal Antwerpen
Tulpstraat 79, BE-2060 Antwerp

Anthony Gormley: Drawing Space

Currently at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO) until February 6, 2011 is an exhibition entitled Drawing Space. In the exhibition, artist Antony Gormley displays what appears to be an evolution of his artworks on paper. He also explores the relationship between his drawings have with the development of his sculptures. The show presents drawings and sculptures which demonstrate how line has migrated from the surface of the paper to physical architectural space.

The exhibition shows Gormley’s drawings from 1981 which are very diagrammatic. The artist created these drawings with black oil paint and charcoal, and then pinned paper to the wall. The exhibition then continues with the night landscapes of the 1990s, and concludes with the most recent linear works.

One particular piece that stands out and did a successful job with representing the concept of is entitled “Mansion”. The artwork is a visual metaphor for the interconnectivity of lines in a mundane drawing or sketch with an actual structure. Although the viewer sees a mere drawing and not a tangible sculpture, we can conclude that both a three dimensional (sculpture) and two dimensional (sketch) are present in “Mansion”.

When we look at the piece we can see that inside of the larger human being there is smaller individual. This inner human may serve as symbolic icon of a two-dimensional sketch; the smaller idea. The larger human represent the actual sculpture as the big idea that could not have existed without a blue print of the smaller idea (the sketch). In vice versa, the correlation between line and space is also vivid in these piece in the way that one cannot sketch a sculpture if the does not exist, and one cannot make such an accurate sculpture without the pre-planning of a sketch. Both three dimensional physical space and flat two dimensional surface space rely on each other in order to create some sort of final artwork.

Another work of art that also complies with the artist’s theme of the migration of line to a physical space from flat surface can be seen in the photo below. At first glance, the sculpture can be described as what appears to be static. There is no clear indication that helps the viewer decipher the image of the sculpture.

However, through a closer look at the structure we can see that there are smaller rectangular objects that contribute to the entirety of sculpture. While the overall contour of the sculpture itself is in a way robust, the details that contribute and make up the sculpture are very linear. Without the linearity of the details the sculpture would not exist in three dimensional space. Through this work of art Gormley provokes the idea that lines gain a sense of relief and freedom away from the weight of description. In other words, line is detached from the burden of having to create a clear description of a recognizable image. Furthermore, the linear qualities of the sculpture create an energetic atmosphere which gives life to the sculpture and helps activate the viewer’s recognition of space.

26 October 2010 - 6 February 2011

au Macro à Rome

Ensor et l'art contemporain

Le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Gand et le S.M.A.K. présentent ensemble l’exposition 'Hareng Saur: Ensor et l’art contemporain'. Cette exposition s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une série de manifestations, tant en Belgique qu’à l’étranger, en l’honneur du 150e anniversaire de la naissance de James Ensor (1860-1949). Elle se distingue en associant l’œuvre d’Ensor à celles d’artistes contemporains.

Hareng Saur: Ensor et l’art contemporain constitue une nouvelle étape dans l’approche de l’œuvre de James Ensor. L’exposition montre que l’art d’Ensor a gardé toute son actualité sur la scène artistique actuelle. Ensor, extrait de son contexte historique, est considéré comme un artiste intemporel, dont les thèmes et la technique sont très proches des pratiques de bon nombre d’artistes contemporains. Les sujets et les points de vue d’Ensor sont donc toujours d’actualité en ce début de vingt et unième siècle. Des thèmes comme le masque et le grotesque, la critique sociale, l’autoportrait, l’identification au Christ, la foule, la satire et la mort n’ont en effet rien perdu de leur portée dans l’art d’aujourd’hui. L’exposition établit des liens inattendus et montre qu’Ensor a cherché à travers son œuvre visionnaire à atteindre un objectif visé par quantité d’artistes actuels.

Outre une large sélection d’ œuvres d’Ensor (tableaux, dessins et gravures), l’exposition regroupe le travail d’artistes qui se réclament ou non d’Ensor, sous forme de tableaux, sculptures, vidéos, installations, performances, dessins...

L’univers plastique d’Ensor est ainsi relié à celui d’Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Francis Alÿs, Huma Bhabha, Jake & Dinos Chapman, George Condo, Thierry De Cordier, Marlene Dumas, Thomas Hirschhorn, Tomasz Kowalski, Jonathan Meese, Bruce Nauman, Ugo Rondinone, Dana Schutz, Cindy Sherman, Raymond Pettibon, Thomas Schütte, Thomas Zipp…

Marlene Dumas

période: 31.10.2010... 27.02.2011

on LINE

Drawing through the twentieth century

exhibition in MOMA, November 21,2010-February 7, 2011

Drawing conventionally has been associated with pen, pencil, and paper, but artists have drawn lines on walls, earth, ceramics, fabric, film, and computer screens, with tools ranging from sticks to scrapers to pixels. Looking beyond institutional definitions of the medium, On Line (on view from November 21, 2010 to February 7, 2011) argues for an expanded history of drawing that moves off the page into space and time. Comprising the work of more than one hundred artists, the exhibition charts the radical transformation of the medium between 1910 and 2010, as artists broke down drawing to its core elements, making line the subject of intense exploration: as the path of a moving point or a human body in motion (the dancer tracing dynamic lines across the stage, the wandering artist tracing lines across the land), as an element in a network, and as a boundary—political, cultural, or social.

On Line is organized chronologically in three sections: Surface Tension, featuring the artistic drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane; Line Extension, composed of works in which lines extend beyond flatness into real space—that is, into social space; and Confluence, presenting works in which line and background are fused, giving greater significance to the space between lines. In following the development of the meaning of line over the last one hundred years, the exhibition traces it in movement, across disciplines, and as it has been drawn out and rewoven in time and space—inevitably reflecting the interconnection and interdependency that are increasingly both shaping and emerging from a globalized society. Line, like thought, once understood as linear and progressive, has evolved into a kind of network: fluid, simultaneous, indefinite, and open.