DRAWING OUT
7 September - 2 October 2021
Anna Barriball, Heidi Bucher, Tom Chamberlain, Andreas Eriksson, Richard Forster, Jonathan Owen, Christine Rebet, Tomás Saraceno
‘You put this here and set off small chords, echoes and repeats and caesuras… to find those moments when… the cadences keep going’. Letters to Camondo, Edmund de Waal[i].
DE LEÓN is pleased to present a group exhibition of work by Anna Barriball, Heidi Bucher, Tom Chamberlain, Andreas Eriksson, Richard Forster, Jonathan Owen, Christine Rebet, and Tomás Saraceno.
The exhibition explores the practice, as well as the idea of drawing in its broadest sense - marks made in space over time using different media including pencil, ink and watercolour on paper, collage, thread, wax, spiders’ webs and film.
Throughout the exhibition we see the artists drawing upon a variety of new and hybrid processes. Andreas Eriksson’s tapestry is drawn in thread, translated from a small section of a much larger painting, the painting in effect becoming the ‘sketch’ for the woven work. Richard Forster’s meticulous drawings explore architecture and can be viewed like the frames of a film to give a sense of narrative. The theme of film continues with Christine Rebet’s hand-drawn animations and what she refers to as her ‘Paper Cinema’, while Jonathan Owen’s Eraser Drawings rework film stills from found book pages and by partially removing the ink he creates wholly new and haunting images. Tom Chamberlain and Anna Barriball’s work share a lightness of mark-making and a precision of process which create images of great subtlety that play with our individual perception of line, form and colour. In contrast, Heidi Bucher’s collages use flat abstract forms cut from silk to create an interplay between positive and negative space, whilst Tomás Saraceno’s Spider/Web Maps are made in collaboration with non-human actors, reflecting on the structures and interconnectedness of communities and species.
Anna Barriball works across a range of media, pushing the boundaries of drawing to reimagine everyday objects in unexpected ways. Most recently she has been working on a series of drawings exploring colour tints and fades. In the diptych Blinds (yellow and pink), shown in the exhibition, powdered pastel is dusted onto paper in layers, blending yellow through to pink. The drawing is then dipped into molten wax. It is then folded horizontally, the gaps between the lines replicating the slats of the venetian blind in her studio.
Shown for the first time since they were made in the 1950s, Heidi Bucher’s collages were her first ‘meaningful artistic outcome’ made at the beginning of her career. Using the materiality and intense colour of silk, Bucher represents movement through the unfolding of the line of the fabric within the flat picture plane. To rework Paul Klee’s famous quote about drawing, Bucher doesn’t just take a line for a walk, but dances with it.
As with Jonathan Owen’s work, Tom Chamberlain’s ‘drawings’ play with our perception - our eyes wander over the surface attempting to hold on to something tangible. Chamberlain uses watercolour on paper, building up an accumulation of marks with exacting precision. The final, almost monochromatic works reveal nuanced forms that shimmer and seemingly float independently of the paper’s surface.
Andreas Eriksson’s artistic practice encompasses a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, tapestry and installation. Fragment, shown in the exhibition, is composed of densely worked embroidery overlaid with delicate needlework. Rich in texture and colour, this woven landscape draws upon the artist's rural surroundings in Medelplana, Sweden. The exploration of his natural environment through the study of its trees, earth and rock formations creates a patchwork topography which appears to hover between abstraction and figuration.
Much of Richard Forster’s practice is a documentary approach to time, process and a sense of place. The works shown in the exhibition are part of Forster’s series Notes on Architecture, a chronology of found images which act as a linear narrative working in a similar way to film animation. Forster’s compulsive attention to detail in his drawings, which he refers to as ‘nearly photo-realistic’, create a labyrinth of associations between different historical sources.
Jonathan Owen’s work involves the systematic transformation of readymade objects and images by taking away what is already there. He is interested in making by reducing and removing. In the Eraser Drawings Owen draws in reverse using not a pencil but rather an eraser. Made using film still images from found book pages – he says ‘I'm able to erase ink gradually, through gradations of tone, leaving lighter and lighter shades of grey, ultimately to the white of the paper. It's also very sculptural, re-shaping existing material into a new form.’ The absence of the image gives it its presence.
Christine Rebet investigates the use of drawing through the moving image in her hand-drawn animated film Breathe In, Breathe Out, which was produced by the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain as part of their Nomadic Nights exhibition, Trees. The film was inspired by the time Rebet spent in the north of Thailand in 2019, and follows the spiritual journey of a monk as he descends a mountain. His path is transformed by the metamorphoses of animals and plants mixed with architectural and mythical forms evoking the devastation of our natural environment in this era of globalisation. The music in the film was composed by Mirwais and the opening and closing words are excerpts taken from Métamorphoses: ‘La vie commune’ by Emanuele Coccia[i].
Tomás Saraceno trained as an architect, and his work is informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics and engineering. He uses the geometries and phenomena of the natural world to explore the ways we live and interact now and in the future. His work explores scale, from the phenomenon of lines drawn by planetary orbits to the intricacies of a spider’s web. The work in the show could initially appear as a graphite drawing but on closer inspection the linearity is created by two spider’s webs from different species woven together. Their sensory worlds and lines of communication merge and connect, the web being considered an extension of the spider’s sensorial and cognitive systems.
His profound interest in spiders and their webs has led to the formation of the Arachnophilia team at Studio Tomás Saraceno: see Arachnophilia.net and the Arachnomancy App.
Anna Barriball – (b. 1972, Plymouth, UK)
Solo and two person exhibitions include: Anna Barriball and Dirk Braeckman, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2020); Fade, Frith Street Gallery, London, UK (2019); Making Visible, Anna Barriball/Susan Hiller, Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Madrid, Spain (2019)); Anna Barriball, Art Centre Pasquart, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland (2018); Anna Barriball & Hannelore van Dijck, Be-Part, Waregem, Belgium (2017); New Works, Frith Street Gallery, London, UK (2016); Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, Denmark (2013); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2013); Anna Barriball, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2012) and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK (2011).
Heidi Bucher (b. 1926, Winterthur, Switzerland, d. 1993, Brunnen, Switzerland)
Solo Exhibitions include: Heidi Bucher.Metamorphoses, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2021 – 2022); Memory as Architecture, Memory as Skin, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil, (2020) Sublime Geometry, Alma Zevi, Venice, Italy (2019); Die Wässer und Libellenlust, the Approach, London, UK (2019); The Site of Memory, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA (2019); Heidi Bucher, Parasol Unit, London, UK (2018).
Tom Chamberlain (b. 1973, Barton on Sea, UK)
Solo exhibitions include: Falling Short, Laure Genillard, London, UK (2020); Wow Drawing, Kunstsaele, Berlin, Germany (group show) (2020)), Morendo, Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, Germany (2019); , Simply a Painting, Kunstverein, Wolfsberg, Austria (group show), (2018); Open and Shut, Obra en Obra, Mexico City, Mexico (2017); If Not Now, Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, Germany (2015); Some Other Time, Scheiblermitte, Berlin (2011).
Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975, Björsäter, Sweden)
Andreas Eriksson: Weavings, sketches, Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden (2021); Andreas Eriksson, i8, Reykjavik, Iceland (2021); From Sketch to Tapestry, Nordic Watercolour Museum, Tjörn, Sweden (2020); Nite Flights, Galerie Neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Germany (2020); Memories of Snow, Cahiers d’art, Paris, France (2020);Mapping memories, tracing time, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2020); High and Low, In-betweens, Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2019); Cutouts, Mistakes and Threads, Braunsfelder Family Collection, Cologne, Germany (2019); Andreas Eriksson: Kria, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2018); Galerie Neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Germany (2017).
Richard Forster – (b. 1970, Saltburn-by-the Sea, Cleveland, UK)
Solo exhibitions include: Notes on Architecture, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA (2019); Notes on Architecture, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, UK (2019); Levittown, Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, USA (2018); Levittown, De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Modern, Whitworth Museum & Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2015), Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2014).
Jonathan Owen – (b. 1973, Liverpool, UK)
Solo exhibitions include: Jonathan Owen, Ingleby, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia (2017); Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2016) Edinburgh Art Festival public commission sited at Burns Monument - part of the commissions programme More Lasting Than Bronze, Edinburgh, Scotland (2016), Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala, India (2016).
Christine Rebet (b. 1971, Lyon, France)
Solo exhibitions include: Escapologie, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France (2021); Time Levitation, Parasol Unit, London, England (2020); Thunderbird, Bureau, New York, USA (2018); Paysage Fautif, Bureau, New York, USA (2015) Christine Rebet, Melli Ink Studio, Grieder Contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland (2014) Meltingsun, AlbumArte, Rome, Italy (2014)
Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973, Tucumán, Argentina)
Solo exhibitions include: The Shed, New York, USA (forthcoming in 2022); we do not all breathe the same air, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Germany (forthcoming 2021); Inter + Play: Towada Art Center, Towada, Japan (2021); Spatial Echoes of Breath, California Air Resources Board (CARB), Sacramento, USA; ARIA, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2020); Event Horizon, Cisternerne, Copenhagen, Denmark (2020); Moving Atmospheres, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2020); Tomás Saraceno: Aerographies The Utopian Practitioner and Visionary, Fosun Foundation Shanghai, Shanghai, China (2019); ON AIR, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Tomás Saraceno: How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany (2017) Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA (2016).