Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Rabley Contemporary Drawing Centre, Marlborough
18 June – 24 July
and
Seven Seven Contemporary Gallery, London
23 September – 9 October
The new Rabley Contemporary Drawing Centre in Marlborough provides a spectacular showcase for its first annually held touring ‘Sketch’ exhibition. We are privy to an intimate form of art, in which ideas are fleshed out in the raw with a compelling directness that is hard to achieve in painting. The centre is a converted barn, and exposed brick walls provide a resonant backdrop to the hung sketchbooks and works on paper of forty-nine selected entrants. Delicate, quirky or controlled energies in quieter works are clustered against a storm of bold disquiet on the back wall of the space.
Karen Lorenz’s autobiographical Book IV series is used as a prop to literally play out personal narratives, past, present and future. Sketchbook pages are soaked with vegetable oil, which seeps through to create drawings of slippages with pencil and crayon. The resultant sequence of imagery, mapping out the choreography of movement, is translated into performance.
Sasha Leech’s sketchbooks hang open with pages aflutter, inviting people to view his Dead Flies series. Flies, drawn to a larger-than-life scale, appear to dive, veer and struggle on their backs with probing legs and bulbous eyes. Bold lines of ink self-meter into spidery limbs and bluebottle washes.
A nightmarish creature morphs between human and gruesome beast in Foster Spragge’s Cyclops series. The pupil of the Cyclops’ all-seeing-eye changes shape in some images: is it smudged? Is it blind? The artist seems to reference Picasso’s Guernica in her depiction of human despair. In Sandy Sykes’ series Get In, Get Out, Get Off, drawing incorporates graffiti and collaged print in voicing social political issues. Cages, wounds, bounded bodies and refugee camps are reoccurring visual symbols. This unique exhibition physically engages the viewer with stories unfolding in image sequences. Leo Duff’s work literally unfolds, as a sheet of concertinaed paper stretched out inside an acrylic box. Depicted is a drawing of a mountain range, seemingly animated as the viewer moves along the piece.
As the organiser Meryl Ainslie expressed, “Sketchbooks are where we keep our visual brains”. ‘Sketch’ reveals intriguing links inherent within an artist’s conceptual development.
chrisdurrant@zoom.co.uk
Writer detail:
Christine Durrant is a video artist based in Wiltshire.
Venue detail:
Seven seven
77 Broadway Market, London Fields, LONDON E8 4PH
No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?
To post a comment you need to login
Back to top