Press

Drawing is where most of us start with art. We draw as children, delighted by the simple act of mark-making. It is also often the point where we leave art behind. Faced with the more rigorous demands of drawing in the classroom, we discover our own limits and retire in honourable defeat.

This is very likely the reason why we retain such a degree of admiration for people who draw. In the melting pot of contemporary art, where the layman struggles to decide what is “good”, drawing provides us with a point of reference. Long after drawing as a discipline went out of fashion in art education, nothing impresses the general public as much as being able to draw.

This exhibition, curated by the Hayward Gallery in collaboration with MIMA in Middlesborough, the Bluecoat in Liverpool and The Drawing Room in London, purports to celebrate a resurgence in drawing. It groups together 11 international artists in their thirties and forties for whom drawing is a central part of their practice. Together they demonstrate a range of approaches to the medium.

The large-scale, highly finished drawings of British artist David Haines are inspired by photographs in newspapers and on the internet, though he recreates the scenes using live models. As big as oil paintings, these ambiguous dramas featuring track-suited youths recall history paintings, albeit stripped of the veneer of grandeur and reduced to the casual violence of the inner city.

Glasgow-based Kate Davis is also interested in dissecting myths, particularly those which surround women artists. She uses fragments of images from photorealist painter Franz Gertsch and a sentence from choreographer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer – “I want everything I make to reflect my whole life” – to probe this subject in her installation Outsider, which includes four large drawings and a display case stuffed with everyday objects. Women’s art is often assumed to be autobiographical, but she makes us question this: are these objects (a duvet, a bottle of vitamin pills, a toy football) expressions of her self any more than the intricate drawings which reproduce and meld fragments of other images?

German artist Marc Brandenburg takes the process of reworking still further by taking photographs himself, then drawing from them. His main body of work here is a series of studies of water, reversing the dark and light elements to create the drawing equivalent of the photographic negative, leaving semi-abstract patterns which retain a watery texture. More interesting is his image Untitled (Skeleton), in which an unsettling figure plays with our notions of plane and perspective, male and female, alive and (un)dead.

Peru-born Fernando Bryce reproduces newspaper text, photographs and political propaganda in his sequence of 111 ink drawings, Kolonial Post. It adds up to a powerful piece of political argument exploring the colonial aspirations of the protagonists in the First World War, and (by implication) the consequences of their actions on today’s world. His decision to reproduce all this material by hand seems to underline the seriousness of his commitment to explore the issues, while at the same time suggesting the flaws inherent in all historical discussion.

Chilean artist Sandra Vasquez de la Horra also has political ends in mind. Her figures at first look like doodles or caricatures, crude fusions of human and animal, but they are in fact biting political satire – in one drawing, two figures cling to a parachute which bears the word “dependence”. However, one would need a more thorough understanding of the personalities of Chilean politics post-Pinochet to appreciate them fully.

They explore an element of the spontaneity of drawing, as do the works of Norwegian Kim Hiorthøy, who is also a graphic designer and book illustrator. In layering finished work on top of unfinished doodles, Hiorthøy pushes that notion still further, as well as exploring a spontaneity of vision which ranges in subject matter from a portrait of a friend to a close-up of a car door or a section of table.

German Jan Albers, meanwhile, builds up images by drawing patterns of lines on paper, then punching holes in them and laying them on top of one another. A network of radiating lines on the wall creates another layer. The resulting pictures of semi-abstracted faces sit between the hand-made and the precision of computer pixellation.

Albers stretches the boundaries of what is understood as drawing, but perhaps not quite as far as Polish artist Monika Grzymala. Her work in this show, 4d, is a “drawing” with black masking tape, a sweep of lines on the wall which also break free of it to “draw” in three-dimensional space. The work, she says, implies movement, and hence a fourth dimension of time, though achieving three dimensions in drawing seems quite ambitious enough.

Garrett Phelan also expands into three dimensions with his installation Battle for the Birds, which explores the potentially violent relationship between birds and humans. A series of drawings, poised somewhere between playful and sinister, depicts atrocities visited on each side by the other; another shows birds in profile wearing military helmets. Handwritten slogans tell us: We fight dirty, Advance on your knees, Nothing will protect you.

In both style and dark, tongue-in-cheek humour, it recalls David Shrigley, who has himself done much for the cause of drawing in contemporary art. He is not in this show, but he easily could be, as could Lucy Skaer and Charles Avery, to name but two more. There are countless others. Whether this is proof positive of a resurgence of drawing, I’m not sure. I suspect it is more likely to be proof that the medium hasn’t gone away. But it does suggest that, contrary to its somewhat apocalyptic title, this show is far from the end of the line.