Barry McGee
Another example is this article on contemporary drawing by Mike Brennan who at the end of the article picks out several artists to watch. As soon as you bring a few of them together though, we become aware that Brennan's interest is in a revival of Surrealist influenced post-modern image making, (see earlier post on pop/expressionist/surrealism) a type of work that relies heavily on fragmented juxtaposition of often seemingly unrelated images or styles so that implied narratives emerge out of the conjunction. Here are a few of the artists I think it is interesting to look at and as you can see not one style proliferates and often the formal concerns are how to balance one element against another, so that more than one thing is readable at the same time. You might argue that this simply causes visual confusion, but a counter argument would be that this reflects the complexity of life as it is experienced today.
Sara Thustra often constructs her images over old off cuts of wood, hardboard, thrown away card or paper. She is interested in surfaces that have some sort of previous life. She then makes images with a variety of styles ranging from the crudest, simplest ways of making a surface, to sophisticated moments of touch that reminded me of Rose Wiley's approach to image making. I liked the fact that I wasn't sure whether or not the image below with the dog was the artwork, or whether it was the wall hung work behind the dog.
Sara Thustra
Andrew Schoultz paints murals, develops installations, and makes drawings to tell stories about everyday life in America. His images are a sort of mash-up between comic art, western and eastern medieval painting styles, graffiti and mural art.
Andrew Schoultz
Travis Millard when still a boy had a revelation that he "was able to draw things that would just make people laugh". A starting point that would ensure his work would always operate on that edge between illustration and fine art that so many people find hard to just accept as art. I found that his drawings cover a fascinating range of emotional relationships with the world and that his humour is a necessary entry point into a very personal approach to resolving the difficulties that life throws at us.
Travis Millard
Adam Janes
Adam Janes makes drawings in a similar way to his installations. He combines collage with drawing to produce conjunctions between things that begin to generate new totalities or narratives, in such a way that you are almost able to grasp what is being 'said' but not quite. Human life is here and it's complicated, and like all good detective stories its in the unravelling backwards from the central event that the interest lies.
Chris Johansen
Chris Johansen, Barry McGee and the San Francisco Mission School, or 'Rustic Art' and low brow aesthetics still seem to be an influence on contemporary drawing, and Robert Crumb and Philip Guston are also still there in the background. There is a desire to validate all those areas that used to be outside of the art canon, such as folk art, illustration, cartoons and naïve or outsider art.
Robert Crumb: From Genesis
Maurizio Cattelan uses drawing to continue to poke fun at the art world and anything else he thinks is worth making fun of. Taking on Guston's legacy and trying to raise silliness into an artform.
Maurizio Cattelan: Self portraits
Maurizio Cattelan
Aurel Schmidt is one of the more stylistically diverse contemporary artists that focuses on drawing. She talks about finding beauty in ugliness and sees the human condition as a cyclical process of renewal and decay. She sometimes uses the detritus of our lives as her subject matter, throwaway ephemera operating as a sort of memento mori, a reminder of our own vulnerability and mortality. She also makes much more 'crafted' drawings, teasing out visual suggestions of sex and death.
Aurel Schmidt
Aurel Schmidt: Exhibition view
Aurel Schmidt
Dominic McGill operates with word and image locked together to create very complex narratives that cover large surfaces, his drawings creating epic voyages through time as he links historical facts with personal imaginings and crazy stories.
Dominic McGill
Dominic McGill
Dominic McGill
Sarah Woodfine returns to the tradition of model making and the use of vitrines as a form of display. Her flat cutouts are rather like toy theatres and they sit on that juncture between drawing and sculpture that allows an artist to maintain a physical presence, whilst still being able to remain a flat image maker.
Sarah Woodfine
Kim Hiorthøy
Wangechi Mutu's images begin with collage and she then works back into their surfaces using watercolour and washes. She uses hybridity as a central concern and working between Kenya and New York and her awareness of growing up in a post colonial society feed into the way that she thinks about image development. Her sculptures follow a similar path and are montages of various found elements that are then reworked using local clays and other materials so that the various elements are brought together into a coherent whole.
Wangechi Mutu
Kate Lyddon's images arrive via free association and found imagery that comes out through the process of drawing itself. Her starting points come from observation but through erasure and reworking, she can discover new forms and hybrids. This is a process I'm very familiar with myself, so I'm glad to see her work represented in the latest Drawing Room exhibition 'Drawn Out'. that opens on the 17th of July. The Drawing Room is also moving to a new gallery space in 2022, to a purpose-built gallery in Bermondsey, southeast London, a fact that reflects how seriously the art world now takes drawing as a stand alone discipline and as a very important way of thinking.
Kate Lyddon
As it's the summer break, this post is also a reminder that in these days of covid rules relaxation, that you can go and visit art exhibitions again and that there is nothing better than going to see physical, hand made art. The lens reduces physicality to pixels on a flat screen and gives you no idea of scale or texture. Looking at actual drawings is always an exciting experience, and they tell you so much more about an artist's intentions or particular understanding of the world than any screen image. For instance I went to see the Rachel Kneebone ceramic installation '399 Days' this weekend in the chapel at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and upstairs there was a small display of her working drawings. A reminder that behind even the most technically accomplished three dimensional work, there are drawings whereby ideas were initially worked out.
Rachel Kneebone
Rachel Kneebone
No comments:
Post a Comment