From Berlin 
EVA & ADELE, Frank Badur, Irina Baschlakow, Helen Cho, Nadine Fecht, Marc Gröszer, Bertram Hasenauer, Björn Hegardt, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Paco Knöller, Ulrich Kochinke, Takehito Koganezawa + Yusuke Oya, Astrid Köppe, Valentin Emil Lubberger, Kazuki Nakahara, Mark Lammert, Corinne Laroche, Fiene Scharp, Hanns Schimansky, Andreas Schmid, Dennis Scholl, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Heidi Sill, Viktor Timofeev, Jorinde Voigt

From London 
Maxime Angel, Daphne Warburg Astor, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, Scott Blaser, Kirsty Buchanan, George Charman, David Connearn, Maryclare Foá, Nick Fox, Joe Graham, Takayuki Hara, Claude Heath, Andrew Hewish, David Hockney, Károly Keserü, Paul Kindersley, David Murphy, Thomas Qualmann, Frances Richardson, Giulia Ricci, Danny Rolph, Gordon Shrigley, Bob and Roberta Smith, Kate Terry, Annabel Tilley, Virginia Verran
At the opening night there will be a drawing-performance by Takehito Koganezawa with music by Yusuke Oya. Start 8 pm.



ANSCHLÜSSEL LONDON/BERLIN This survey by C4RDs Andrew Hewish seeks to present the vibrancy and depth of drawing production in London and Berlin. From recent graduates to the well established, these artists operate from within an understanding of the complexities of drawing values, of Anschlüssel: speculative, connective, playful - unlocking links wherever a line might lead. In bridging the space between these two metropolises, we find similar polyglot populations, artists from all over the world working in these cities, and with a similar breadth of expressive possibilities that reflect the exchange of ideas and forms in a globalised field.
Certain resonances occur within the exhibition, some localised but most shared between cities: the pop aesthetic in Blake, Rolph, Angel, Tilley and others work from London, but also in EVA + ADELEs; the private, emblematic work of Nakahara, Hasenauer, Cho, Köppe, and Fecht, from Berlin, yet also found in Haras.
Other resonances are shared more broadly - the formal investigations of Badur, Ricci, Schmid, Shrigley, Slavnics, Terry, Connearn, Qualmann, Keserü and Scharp the vitality of text in Smith, Lammert, Kochinke and Kindersley; the free and exploratory play of Schimannsky, Foá, Knöller, Murphy, Lubberger and Astor; the hermetic worlds and signs of Gröszer, Baschlalow, Hegardt, Timofeev and Verran; the problematics of gesture in Richardson, Laroche, Auerbach, Hewish, Jenssen, Fox, Blaser, Scharp, Sill and Charman; the technological experimentation of Hockney, Koganezawa and Heath.

Like any art of today, drawing can be considered completed by the viewer; but in completing the circuit of a drawing, a special kind of complexity filter is introduced. In an age of art where much is focused on a final outcome, be it product or conclusive meaning or image for the viewer, drawing offers a refreshing alternative. Drawing drags with it complex and disparate historical meanings particular to itself, all of which can brought to bear in the recognition of a works status as a drawing. This particular set of meanings and questions are ones that drawing artists engage with in their daily practice.
Drawing has associations with being fragile, or temporary, containing gestures that are as much fleeting ideas as they might be marks on the page. It recalls time. It can rely on networks, of points in space or page, that are necessarily connected in the completion of the work; points that make stories, pathways, or forms. It can be closely associated with the interior life of the artist, their passions and intentions, that can be subsumed by systems or processes, or engage a subtle negotiation between consciousness, technic and ground. We can connect, along the lines, the mindfulness, or otherwise, of the artist. It often engages directly the body of the artist, tracing their movement, allowing the viewer direct access to the record of its own making. It can love its own materiality. It can spectacularly stimulate our vision. It can graph data; write language. It can promote stages of development, or lyrical leaps of imagination. It can articulate imaginative space, or record observed space. It can draw on its own visual language, blending different traditions to forge new meanings.

It is the exercise of imagination on line.

Bruits de fond - white noise in English- is an invisible sound, that you can listen to only through specific frequencies. It is also the title of a book by Don Dellilo, who describes the life of a common town in America, disturbed by the apparition of a black cloud. The perception of the real, altered by misinformation and rumours, provides an uncertain scenario where everything becomes possible.

Paul Valéry wrote "There is something falser than false; it is the combination of true and false." This play between the real, its representation, and different universes that co-exist open new working tracks that will be developed in this show.

The presence of a billboard points to the artificiality of some drawings, the play between true and fake, and the many stage settings, making the drawing even more complex, and more difficult to approach. On a formal level, these drawings are more pictorial: realized with ink and brush, they are more elaborate and widen the graphic means, in a powerful way. The care taken during the creation, the use of black and the density of forms, are elements which contribute to fix the viewer’s look and question what is given to see.

The drawing also becomes a metaphor for the creation process or for the elaboration of the work itself, through the presence of elements borrowed from building sites: scaffolding, bricks and blocks are staged, or hold mysterious forms that always appear as dynamic and fluid. In spite of the drawing precision, these forms remain quite difficult to grasp.

The forms turn into autonomous elements and play with the properties of black, showing its colouring abilities. Some of the large format works, called “Sculptures�, are exclusively realized with black felt-tip pen; they show sophisticated, surprisingly colourful forms, which by nature are hard to describe: a geological, sculptural, or digital creation.

The wall drawing plays with space and presents new forms of working on site: works on the wall are often as detailed and accurate as works on paper. Realized directly, without any video projected model, it is an unedited drawing constructed in relation with the exhibition space. Despite the delicate treatment, it is ephemeral and, consequently, always “in the process of becoming�, as a dynamic and transformable object.

It is our pleasure to present the third solo exhibition of the Stuttgart based artist Thomas Müller. As an artist who exclusively focuses on the medium of drawing, Thomas Müller commands a prominent position in this field. In the 90s his work has been on show at the New York Drawing Centre and has been a part of the most important drawing exhibitions of the last few years, including “Linea, Linie, Line� - IFA’s (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) extensive drawing overview in Bonn. It is also present among numerous German and international collections, such as the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Pinakothek der Moderne München, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2010 Müller was nominated for the Fondation Guerlain’s renowned “Prix de dessin contemporain�.

Müllers work explores the substance and nature of drawing and the drawing process itself, which materializes as a stroke or trace on the page and means the line doesn’t depict nor describe but becomes the subject matter itself. With an immense variety of materials such as chalk, ink, oils, acrylics, ballpoint pen, colour and led pencil, Thomas Müller explores the image space. This he partially fills with either minimal markings or dense rhythmically interwoven grids and wave-like structures, which appear as if they were extracts of an unending continuum.

Müller’s drawings, which have emerged for years in small and large formats have been created through a consistent flow of production; they always respond symmetrically to earlier creations by the permutation, modification of the motifs and polarization of the answers. His drawings are polylinear in the sense that they follow simultaneous paths of evolution, which Müller pursues in parallel and which can cross-pollinate but can also repel each other like strong magnetic fields.

One could also describe Müller’s work as the poetics or grammar of the art of drawing. The analogy to language can prompt Wittgenstein’s famous dictum from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world� (Tractatus 5.6).

A new publication, produced in collaboration with the London Centre for recent drawings, is now available.

We are delighted to present the exhibition L’ÉCOLE SANS DIEU, new works by the Berlin based artist Ulrich Kochinke. This is our second solo exhibition of his work. The vigorous, large format drawings distinctly differentiate themselves from his previous minimalist approach, though upon close observation one recognises overriding concepts and themes that are hereby expressed through a new style.

His almost life-size led pencil drawings confront with strong expressions and rich contrasts. The drawing’s themes and motifs concern most varied epochs, genres and media. They cite today’s popular culture as well as historical pictures and Christian iconography. Similar to the Sampling process, the eclectic assembly of the pictures in our collective consciousness is hereby multilayered and interlaced: both visually and substantially. Kochinke combines and confronts worldly themes with religious motifs, the holy with the profane. Emblems from the skater scene, comic-figures, logos and typefaces meet on one spiritual plain.

The dynamic, expressive drawing style exploits memories and impressions that have been burnt into our retina, like an annexed iconography. In a world of free-floating symbols, the nature of visual encoding is re-questioned: amongst multi-encoded pictures Kochinke examines the conflict-laden contradiction of faith and world order – and yet without irony entertains their current relevance. How can universal and entirely existential questions and needs be negotiated? Here institution and religion coincide with the world of trivial conversation and consumerism.

Ulrich Kochinke combines and collates images and symbols and enforces an osmotic
penetration of the seemingly contrary motifs. In their transformed context the motifs find themselves newly illuminated, with which the questions of today’s values are posed.

Before all other forms of artistic expression, drawing has a great, almost anarchic freedom. Where painting has to invoke past examples or a new grand gesture with every brushstroke, the drawing can quietly claim everything for itself. With simple means it creates an inner dynamic it has no need to justify. Here a sketch on a paper napkin, there a concept for an intellectual construct, it can also become independent and finally refer to nothing but itself and still give rise to a complex result.

Its link to film is immediately obvious. A film project is sketched by hand in simple sequences. The first cartoons were made as early as 1906. In these early years stop-motion technique was used to make drawings into moving images and the artistic content of a film: in 1919 the Dadaist and experimental film-maker Viking Eggeling combined 5000 drawings into a remarkable abstract horizontal-vertical orchestra. In the film industry, at the same time, the cartoon took a different direction: in the Walt Disney studios the drawing became material and a whole crew of talented anonymous draughtsmen and women produced thousands of movement sketches. Cartoon sequences are more rarely seen as independent drawings than the comic, which was liberated from its lowbrow status to become the graphic novel. For animators the drawn poses and in-betweens merely serve as material for their films. It is not often that the drawings attain an artistic value of their own as drawn film stills.

In our project we introduce draughtsmen and women who see their drawings as coequal to their animations. We show how both media inspire and complement one another.
The exhibition closes a gap in the contemporary reception of drawing. There is not only the traditional drawing on paper and its break-through into space. There is also the drawing in media that exist in relation to one another. The drawing on paper and the drawing in film are complementary poles that can’t do without each other. Work on paper is to a certain extent the analogue formulation of the idea/concept, and the animated film its digital configuration, its vivification. The art of the past, present and future meets in the alliance between these two very different media and finds an adequate contemporary expression. It is vital and flexible, open to the future, with a solid basis in drawing and thus in thinking.

Sewn, embroidered and punched: The exhibition Threaded Lineart looks at the way in which lines in different textures and material qualities create cross-genre links between drawings, sculptures and installations. Drawings have always served as an indispensable step towards conceptualisation and the creation of drafts, symbolising the very act of creating an idea and therefore manifesting an elementary part of fine art. Yet over and above this sketching function, many contemporary artists use drawings as an artistic means of expression which implies an ongoing desire to redefine and explore the limits of this medium. These endeavours to expand the purpose of drawing have recently led to a focus not only on the traditional shape of a drawing on paper, but also on broadening the potential range of ideas that can be associated with lineart. After all lines as the central elements of a drawing exist just as much on the two-dimensional level as they do in three-dimensional space where they function as vectors between two points and where they create a given volume. Threaded Lineart  highlights the different aspects and techniques of the medium, based on nine specially selected artistic positions. The broad spectrum of these positions illustrates the seemingly endless variety of contemporary drawings.
 
The two central starting points in the work of the fine artist and musician Michaela Melián (1956) are history and topography. The exhibition will include Melián’s sewn drawings, with the basic motifs displayed through the medium of a camera. Photographs are translated into drawings, yet not by a conventional crayon or pencil, but by a sewing machine. The continuous machine-sewn thread shows the silhouettes of landscapes, buildings and streets. As the artist uses both an upper and bobbin thread, each picture has two sides. This reflects the historic heritage of many German towns and cities which often have both a visible side and a hidden side.
 
Tracey Emin (born in 1976) focuses on sexuality, drugs and other passions as her work is largely motivated by her own story. Textile materials play a major role in her art, including her well-known works “My Bed� and “Everyone I Have Slept With� . When a large-scale retrospective exhibition was held at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2009, it included embroidered tapestries the size of banners, bearing a variety of slogans.
 
The Albanian artist Anila Rubiku (born in 1970) will be showing her series “Sewn Memories�. Each piece of embroidery comes in pairs, as a diptychon, yet this two-part constellation manifests itself not just formally but also in artistic content. One piece of work always shows a realistic three-dimensional situation without any individuals, where the focus is always on the furnishings of the room. The other item has one or more figures who have been divested of their physical nature and who have been turned into abstract entities. Dream and reality, memory and fiction thus become indistinguishable under the duality of representational items and fragmented abstraction.

The drawings and paintings of Motoko Dobashi (born in 1976) combine pictorial elements of traditional Japanese graphic arts with the old masters of European art. At the same time the artist tries to find references of form and content in modern everyday art, as borrowed from comics and street art. In her narrative, representational scenes she plays with spatial illusions that are confined to subdued colours which further enhance the magical language of her artistic language.

The recurring elements in Matthias Männer’s (born 1976) latest large-scale installations are black cables. Whether separately or in bunches, these black cables cling to the three-dimensional sculptures which are presented either in the middle of a room or which protrude from a wall.  The black cables contrast sharply with the white surfaces of his fantasy sculptures. The three-dimensional composition of each Styrodur surface is effectively complemented by the linearity of the cables that lead either towards the ceiling or along the ground.

Carola Bark (born in 1965) draws her grid structures both on two-dimensional surfaces and in space. Whether it is paper and board or the floor and the walls, the artist covers these surfaces with a graphic network of lines, composed of graphite, adhesive tape, thread and rubber cord. Since her “Interventions� in public space, whereby she adorned façades and advertising columns with adhesive tape from 2001 to 2004, her art has been particularly inspired by architecture as well as by music. The previously reduced colour repertoire in her lined patterns has recently been expanded to include very vivid colours.

Fred Sandback (1994-2003) saw himself as a sculptor. Yet instead of working with stone, he used a material that is infinitely lighter: coloured acrylic threads. And instead of displaying any form of monumentalism, the results of his three-dimensional work are minimal in character. Moreover, they are walk-in sculptures, as Sandback saw them as “drawings to live in�. The same immediacy also characterises Sandback’s lino cuts and lithographic works, of which several editions are shown at the exhibition.

The South Korean artist Jeongmoon Choi (born 1966) will be showing her large installation “Bottomless Pits�. Fifteen vessels, woven together from wool, can be seen hovering vertically between floor and ceiling. The woollen threads, which are blue, yellow, red, black and white, remind us of a traditional Korean national dress, a hanbok. The shapes of the vessels are based on traditional Korean pottery items, known as onggi. Asian tradition and Western art meet in a room installation where the title refers to two idiomatic phrases, one in German and the other in Korean.

Christof Zwiener (born in 1972) measures real and fictitious space with yarn. Using network structures and lengths of thread, he generates perspective-based scenarios that emerge and disappear, so that they are characterised in their basic idea by Baudelaire’s “aspect of volatility�. In Threaded Lineart  he will be showing a range of works in which he presents a deconstructive discussion of Fred Sandback’s graphic and threaded works.