Contemporary International Drawing
Rina Banerjee, Robert Crumb, Justin Craun, Ewan Gibbs, Paul Johnson, Sean McCarthy, Soshiro Matsubara, Tamsin Morse, Paul Noble, Dan Perfect, Dieuwke Spaans, Karen Russo
27 January - 5 March 2006
To mark the opening of our new gallery space One in the Other is pleased to present an exhibition of drawing by twelve international artists.
The exhibition is intended as a kind of microcosm, or cardiogram, on the condition of drawing. A medium that is often used as a testing ground for other ideas, and works, as well an end itself. Whether it be the intensely programmatic study of naturalism in Ewan Gibbs work, or the Pagan-like defacements of elfin magazine models by Dutch artist Dieuwke Spaans, the emphasis on drawing seems as demanding as ever.
Robert Crumb and his seemingly dyspeptic satirical anthropology, and Paul Noble, with a fictional dys/utopian template for civilisation, are well known for making drawing a primary, cutting-edge, satirical tool. This, they’ve done, whilst displaying an invention, versatility and immediacy that has sometimes left other mediums appearing lethargic and unresponsive to contemporaneity.
At an entry point at the reverse end of the spectrum are the works of Tamsin Morse and Dan Perfect, who use drawing as a laboratory for larger, as yet, unrealised painterly works. Despite this, neither use it as preparatory subservient exercises, but rather as works on paper that act as a cog in the engine that drives the production of ideas of what they do. Both use a conflated language between figuration and abstraction.
Typifying the rise in subjectivity in alot of young artists work are the drawings of Paul Johnson, Rina Banerjee and Sean McCarthy. Banerjee, of Indian extraction and living in New York, and McCarthy also from and living in New York, explore internal meditative worlds of fantasy, fairy tales and mythology. In Banerjee’s case she plays with, and exploits, a perceived cultural bias from her Indian upbringing and background. Johnson, on the other hand, who is known for an interest in outsider art, makes portraits of people that reflects much visionary art and its tendency to have only meaning to the artist themself.
At a more graphic, more hard edged end of a pictorial spectrum are the works of Tokyo artist Soshiro Matsubara, Israeli Karen Russo and New York based artist Justin Craun. Craun’s work explores a kind of vacuum caused by the after effects of thirty years of Robert Crumb’s acerbic observations, but from an accentuated realm of the grotesque. Matsubara has created a seemingly Brit-pop-art spoof in colour saturated optimistic-but-not narratives, hewn from collaged magazine imagery, and Karen Russo’s work takes a more ambiguous and thoughtful approach to landscape and found imagery.
ET 2006 Justin Craun
Ink on paper,
76 x 56cm