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.

Supakitch & Koralie

SUPAKITCH & KORALIE - VÄRLDSKULTUR MUSEET GÖTEBORG from elr°y on Vimeo.

Sandra Vasquez de la Horra au Bonnenfantenmuseum,Maastricht

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is her name. She has Chilean nationality but has been living in Düsseldorf since 1995. Her work is 'modest'. It is small-scale and concerns drawings. But, good heavens – when she hangs those drawings on the wall! Then they become part of a greater whole; a chain that can stretch over the entire wall. Her world is populated by bidden and unbidden guests. She welcomes them in, without respect to persons. It must be said, however, that once they are caught in her net, there is no escape. Everything and everybody is 'sealed' beneath a thin layer of beeswax, which is applied over all the drawings. Something that was initially fluid and therefore malleable suddenly appears unmanageable; in readiness for eternity.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra's cultured and sophisticated art, while thrusting its roots down into South American origins, is nurtured by a rich and varied visual culture as well as an in-depth knowledge of European and South-American literature, philosophy and anthropology. Italian culture left a deep-seated mark on her; its great classical authors, such as Dante, and its artists and architects –Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and Palladio – figure among her references. She read André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and particularly liked Paul Eluard. She later discovered North American literature, Walt Whitman, and the writers of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, later, Jack Kerouac.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra always drew. Her radically figurative drawings are never "beautiful" in the classic sense of the term. They have a rough, immediate quality, a sense of urgency to them. They feature many personal elements. Since 1997, the artist finishes her drawings by dipping them in wax. This treatment gives her work a unique materiality and endows the pencil line with ambiguous depth. The wax serves as a translucent skin, providing a patina to the drawing that transports it to another time.

The artist readily uses a variety of paper qualities and colours, and is particularly fond of accounting pads with columns marked by red lines. As a result she can use old paper, often of mediocre quality, which she enjoys rummaging around for at flea markets. Her line is fluid, firm and applied in an unbroken movement. The shapes are often filled in, as if "coloured in" in graphite, in a wide variety of greys and blacks, and sometimes, though rarely, set off by a touch of yellow, pink or red.

Each of her drawings is a work of art in its own right, telling a particular story and revealing a particular soul, but Vásquez de la Horra likes to arrange them to form large wall installations comprising up to a hundred pieces at times of a variety of sizes. The setup is temporary, susceptible to being modified for a given space. It requires an attentive gaze and an intuitive sense on the part of the artist to produce a narrative structure that is strictly speaking storyless yet imbued with a humour that is at once exuberant, baroque and filled with acuity.

Typography is widely present in Sandra Vásquez de la Horra's work. Many of her drawings combine figure and writing, with the latter changing the import of the picture. She likes to use capital letters, small and large, that she lays out as she wishes with no regard for correct grammatical breaks, thereby producing surprising words, charged with new meanings. Sometimes the artist allows the words to take up most of the space, dominating the motif and becoming the real subject of the drawing. It is tempting, in particular in the German context, to compare her way of working with language to that of the great masters of subversion of words and letters from the Dada period, Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann in particular.

In relation to her anthropological studies, myths and popular tales are at the centre of the artist's concerns and provide her with the subject of many drawings. Religion and sex are also major themes in her work. She takes up as subjects the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Conception, as well as saints, such as Lazarus and Sebastian. As for sex, it's treated very naturally and quite casually. Politics is also an important component in Vásquez de la Horra's world, although it tends to play a latent role.

Vásquez de la Horra also participates in the tradition of a great family of artists, one of whose ancestors are Goya and Redon. Some of her figures, particularly their faces, seem to be a discreet, vibrant tribute to the great 'master of blacks'. Like Redon, Vásquez de la Horra has a pronounced taste for the strange and the morbid. And like him, she has a predilection for skulls, hanged bodies, ghostly apparitions, and the figure of Saint Sebastian that Redon drew and painted often. She has managed nearly imperceptibly in her work to retranscribe this influence in her own pictorial idiom.

jusqu'au 24 octobre 2010

The more I draw

Drawing as a Concept for the World

September, 5 2010 to February, 13 2011

Museum of Contemporary Art, Siegen

Constantin Luser

Sprawling fantastic worlds, fictitious maps, exuberant, comic-like picture stories, diagrams depicting the knowledge of the world, subconscious doodles that illustrate the soul’s inner workings: Drawing is a spontaneous, sweeping artistic medium through which myriad realities become unfurled. Drawing is also a medium that directly connects with our everyday experience: Every child draws, every adult scribbles regularly, draws up plans, sketches routes, attempts a portrait or simple chart.

On over 1,400 m² space our overview exhibition The More I Draw in the Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen highlights the tendencies in contemporary art drawing since the 1960s, focusing on the serial, narrative, descriptive, and mythologizing forms.

The exhibition showcases 41 international artists and aims at revealing the definitive role drawing plays in modern art, a role that was conceived by Conceptual Art, which discovered drawing as an original art medium and to a large extent helped to revaluate it through its conceptual traits.

Well-known artists‘ approaches are shown in an historical retrospective, such as by Joseph Beuys, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré or Cy Twombly, but also other important illustrators of the following generation, for example Anna Oppermann or Tomas Schmit, among others. A focal point of the exhibition is the actual practice of drawing, visualized by extensive groupings of works and drawing installations by contemporary artists such as Jorinde Voigt, Dan Perjovschi, or Alexander Roob, artists who have expanded drawing as an art form experimentally and through performance.

The artists of the exhibition (in chronological order): Joseph Beuys, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Rühm, André Thomkins, Stanley Brouwn, Anna Oppermann, Hanne Darboven, Katharina Meldner, Tomas Schmit, Barbara Camilla Tucholski, Heinz Emigholz, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Nanne Meyer, Peter Radelfinger, Silvia Bächli, Harald Falkenhagen, Joseph Grigely, Alexander Roob, Raymond Pettibon, Nedko Solakov, Mark Lammert, Dan Perjovschi, Johnny Miller, Dorothea Schulz, Tracey Emin, Claude Heath, Pia Linz, Hannes Kater, Pavel Pepperstein, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, David Shrigley, Chloë Piene, Ryõko Aoki, Christelle Franc, Katrin Ströbel, Ralf Ziervogel, Constantin Luser, Dasha Shishkin, Jorinde Voigt and Mariusz Tarkawian.

An extensive catalogue will be published at the beginning of September. The catalogue will include an introductory essay by Eva Schmidt and an article by Michel Sauer, next to expositions on the artists and a commentated index by Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge on exhibitions, blogs, publications, etc. that are dedicated to drawing as a medium. Publisher: DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne.

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Eraserhead in Fruehsorge Galerie,Berlin

Jonathan Callan - Jürgen von Dückerhoff - Alex Hamilton - Bertram Hasenauer Christian Holstad - Hansjörg Schneider - Mark Sheinkman - John Sparagana

Inspiried by the exhibition If you melted, I would melt myself in to you at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art in London.

Erasing – wiping out – eliminating...

These are the techniques and terms that the artists presented in the exhibition Eraserhead are dealing with. Melting as a concept is here brought to the next level: to the point of the dissolution of the material. Through this process something new emerges. At the same time, nothing can be erased completely: The remains of the original objects are still present in the newly formed shapes: the traces left behind are still visible. The artists erase and transform the visuel information, and in doing so, they have to include the eliminated part in the concept of their new draft. Whatever emerges is thereby responding to the erased parts. In 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg was still at the beginning of his carrier, he asked Willem de Kooning if he would give one of his drawings to him, so he could erase it. In erasing art, Rauschenberg created his own art that gained its significance through the previous creation. An act of patricide and birth.

Erasing, sanding and eliminating are procedures that employ the materiality of the medium. New motifs emerge from the existing objects and at the same time the characteristics of the medium paper are being made visible: its vulnerability, its fragility, its evanescence.

Duration of the show: 10.09 – 23.10. 2010