Drawings

Wall-, floor-, light-based and free-hanging, the drawings in this show defy the status of the drawing as solely a preliminary study and revel in the use of colour – with all its associations of pleasure, emotion and the urban commercial world.

Jim Isermann’s work stands at the forefront of the cross-fertilisation of art and design. His dynamic drawings articulate his interest in the logic of repeated pattern and colour and its role in design and function. They are decidedly hand-made yet they use a visual language more associated with mass-production

Renouncing line in favour of colour, Juan Uslé’s watercolours combine a compelling collision of forms which draw on architecture, technology, textiles, signage and landscape.

Fiona Banner’s Colour Blind (Arsewoman) and Black Blind hang in the centre of the room. Slashed to form vertical blinds, the many lines of which they are comprised are consumed by its sheer scale. Like a curtain, the drawings act as ‘space-confusers’, at once inviting you to pass through it but denying access.

Polly Apfelbaum’s floor drawings of stained, synthetic velvet move through the space like an organic growth, seeping across the gallery floor like liquid spills. Single Gun Theory resists the traditional rules of abstract painting, introducing an haptic and fetishistic dimension and suggesting that colour has come loose and escaped the confines of the frame.

Like Apfelbaum, by taking liquid incident as her starting point, Ingrid Calame undermines traditional notions of authorship. For her Working Drawings, Calame begins by hand-tracing stains from the sidewalks of LA. These tracings are them combined in an invented constellation and re-traced in coloured pencil to create complex maps of time and place, moment and continuum, part and whole.

By literally drawing on the object in coloured marker pen, Anna Barriball circumvents the traditional notion of transferring the object onto paper. In green + blue = cyan, she describes both the angle-poise lamps and the light they emit, the tangible and the intangible, as well as the overlap of light-colour between the two arcs of coloured light.