Aligned

Aligned brings together a group of artists working in a broad variety of disciplines and themes, yet for all of them the act of drawing remains at the core of their practice.

Massimo Bartolini’s works are closely connected with the artist’s own surroundings. In his drawings he employs a visual language that is highly communicative and rich in meaning. Many of his pieces create an interface between the man-made and the natural world. In this exhibition he will exhibit a number of beautiful drawings inspired by his own garden in Italy.

Tacita Dean’s alabaster drawings are created using the natural grain of this soft and opaque rock. By subtly inscribing the random, organic lines Dean somehow exposes a hidden world of signs, meaning and stories within an apparently lifeless material.

John Morris’ drawings are astonishing in their near microscopic delicacy. At the same time they are witty and highly inventive in the ways they play with composition and art historical influences. Some tightly controlled, almost robotically repetitive in their imagery, others more freehand in their doodling, the drawings evoke man-made and natural phenomena, among them patterns from nature, electronic circuitry, virus colonies, human cells and musical notations.

Giuseppe Penone first achieved recognition for his work associated with the Arte Povera movement in Italy in the 1960s, in which artists worked using materials from daily life such as sand, earth, stones, fabric and newspapers. Impronte del Vasaio (1975) consists of 36 individual works and was inspired by an old clay jar found by the artist who noticed that it still held the imprints of the original potter’s fingerprints. This particular work is described by Penone as communicating a sense of the exchange of identity which occurs when one touches or picks up an object on which there remains the trace or imprint of another hands.

Kathy Prendergast works in a huge variety of materials; string, wool, eggs, paint, photography, fabric, found objects and human hair. She is known for her elegant, almost ghostly drawings of city street plans. These pieces are much more than representations of a physical landscape, they somehow communicate the life of the city. In the exhibition Kathy will show a series of large works depicting the outlines of the lakes of Canada. Each work contains the individual profile of the thousands of separate bodies of water; displaced from their original context they are both enigmatic and incredibly evocative.