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2007
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on aluminum, 300 drawings
32 x 24 cm each
Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, DE
The Bonner Kunstverein has its home in a former flower market hall, a wide and tall concrete-skeleton building featuring whitewashed walls and columns, gray floors, and a ceiling punctuated by skylights and structured by the architectural grid. Within the framework of a group exhibition (with Carsten Fock, Svenja Kreh, Anna Ling, Bernd Ribbeck, and Dennis Scholl), these dimensions were used for an installation of drawings that presents the conflict between the individual picture’s claim to attention and the integrative unity of the constellation as a whole in the form of an exemplary contradiction.
A cell had been built into the hall—its floor plan took up the ceiling grid—and the installation was implemented on one of its walls, measuring ca.18 ft in height and 49 ft in width. Affixed to this wall were nine rows of thirty portrait drawings each, in a variety of formats ranging from ca. 13x10 inch to 18x13 inch. On the wall, which was painted blue almost to the edges, the two hundred and seventy drawings form a grid pattern that is clearly structured but irritates the gaze at the individual picture. The common motif in all drawings is the face. Initially, the plan had been to create work based on artists’ self-portraits, but then the spectrum of sources was extended to include a variety of images; many of the faces are in fact inventions. The drawings have been realized in various techniques (charcoal, ink, pencil, watercolor, acrylic). The typology of styles ranges from photographically generated realistic portraits to diffuse grimaces, from caricatures to historic portraits. Some of the sheets integrate the blue color of the wall background into the image area.
An innovation in this series is the use of thin aluminum sheets to stabilize the paper ground. At a thickness of .2 inch, they are just stiff enough to neutralize tensions within the paper, guaranteeing a perfectly flat support medium. This surface serves not only as the support of the portrait drawing itself laminated onto the aluminum sheet, but also as an illusionistic frame. By means of a simple parallel projection oriented toward vantage points that vary but are always located fairly low, the perfectly flat support medium is folded out into the volume of a frame of which, in each individual instance, the shaded bottom edge and one lateral edge are visible. The drawing laminated onto the aluminum is thus contained within a trompe-l’oeil frame, often complemented by a passepartout. The material support medium itself, the aluminum sheet, is integrated into the illusion of the frame in two ways: the aluminum is in part used as the frame’s color; and the shape of the sheet is adapted to that of the frame as seen in the illusion. Surplus aluminum is cut off not only in the case of rounded corners; the two triangles that ‘protrude’ where the edge of the frame tapers at an oblique angle have likewise been cut, so that the pictorial illusion here takes control of its material support. (The same principle is applied in SAFE) The illusion thus begins at the edge of the material support medium. The pictorial ground itself and the laminated drawing with it acquire an unstable reality-status. Read from the counterfeit frame, the drawing can also appear to be no more than a drawn drawing, a sort of ‘imitation drawing’ (comparable to the imitation wood and imitation marble employed in other works), so that the face, the drawing’s referent, finds itself displaced to the ‘innermost’ center of a multilayered illusion that floods the pictorial support to its edge and integrates its objective materiality. The object thus transformed into a simulacrum of itself—the drawing, the frame, and the support medium in their superimposition and intertwinement—is in turn lost in the total composite of the wall, whose coat of blue paint leaves the white color of the ‘bottommost’ support medium, the wall, uncovered near the edges. The integration of the two hundred and seventy drawing objects into this total composite is made complete by the fact that the hanging, from left to right, follows a gradation from highly contrastive to ever paler and more washed-out drawings.