Thursday 15 December 2016

Louise Lawler: Modern Art Oxford

Louise Lawler

I have mentioned Louise Lawler’s work before in reference to ‘tracing’. She is in a very good exhibition in Oxford at the moment;

KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality - Modern Art Oxford - until 31 December 2016

If you are interested in that interface between drawing and photography Lawler’s work is very interesting, especially if you are also thinking of how the use of vector graphic packages can extend the way you think about scale.



Over the last 30 years, Louise Lawler has been making photographs that depict views of objects and artworks in their everyday working environments, shifting the emphasis from the subject itself to vantage points, framing devices and the modes of distribution that affect the reception of an artwork. Lawler is showing a group of ‘tracings’. Traced directly from her photographs, and made in collaboration with the artist and children’s book illustrator Jon Buller, the ‘tracings’ are black-and-white line drawings that are converted to a vector graphic and printed on a vinyl that is adhered directly to the wall. Each edition exists as an adaptable digital file that can be printed at any size. The largest work in the show is Pollock and Tureen (traced) (1984 / 2013), a ‘tracing’ of Lawler’s photograph Pollock and Tureen from 1984. The original work is a medium-sized photograph, just under a metre wide, of a decorative piece of porcelain placed on a shelf beneath the expressive splatters of a Pollock painting. Pollock and Tureen (traced) has been enlarged to almost ten metres to occupy a substantial section of one of the gallery walls. At this scale, many of the lines in the vector drawing start to behave less predictably, often taking on a form of their own when viewed up close. Viewed from afar, the picture again coheres into a recognisable image. Each ‘tracing’ becomes both a representation of a previous artwork by Lawler and a wall based installation in a particular space.
The fine art use of what used to be ‘graphic design’ techniques is becoming more and more prevalent and these techniques are tailor made for enlarging work to different sizes in order to respond to the changes in scale needed when moving an idea between different sites.
So if you are near Oxford over Xmas why not pop in for a look?

Exhibition view

See also:

Louise Lawler
 Some initial thoughts on her use of tracing

The Bézier Curve Thoughts on the maths behind drawing software programs such as 'Illustrator'


Painting by numbers A children's book illustrator is used to sort out and clarify the flat forms used for this process


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