A Space full of Drawings and a Drawing in Space

with works by Stephen Antonakos, John Beech, Hal Busse, Olaf Holzapfel, Bernd Lohaus, Aron Mehzion, Ferdinand Penker, Joanna Przybyla, Fred Sandback, Elodie Seguin, Günther Uecker.

The world is loud,
And I’m quiet!
(…)

Paul Scheerbart, 1909

Now that the streets are getting fuller and louder again, public life is slowly rebooting, and most people are trying to feel their way to a “new normal” that is as busy as possible, we are using our summer exhibition to celebrate once more the value of stillness, concentration, and slowness. All of the works gathered in the showing – mostly drawings – are nonfigurative and borne by a gesture of tranquility. Nothing here pounces upon the viewer, nothing imposes itself. The works ask the viewer for a stance corresponding to the artistic stance – a focused and nuanced grasping of their respective aesthetic qualities.

Despite the stringency of their fundamentally deliberate and measured work methods, the formal questions and emphases of the participating artists can be clearly distinguished. The combination and juxtaposition of precise color values to create illusionistic pictorial spatiality (Elodie Seguin), the repetition and overlapping of figurative motifs with the goal of advancing their dissolution (Aron Mehzion), the variation and repetition of simple pictorial components in the development of a dynamic composition (Penker and Uecker)… to briefly allude to just a few aspects. The works on paper are supplemented by a drawing in space by the Polish artist Joanna Przybyla. Several bent branches are assembled slightly overhead on nylon threads to a form adapted to the respective exhibition space. The shadows of the individual branches set subsequent amplitudes of draftsmanship vibrating in space.

With the exhibition, we hope that an experience that most of us were forced to have during the first weeks of the course of the pandemic – namely the possibility of undisturbed contemplation – can be extended into the realm of aesthetics. If the mood of the artistic creativity assembled here encounters a corresponding sensorium on the part of the viewers, then it may be possible in the exhibition to aesthetically mirror a form of inner self-communion and make it experiencable.