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“We owe it to Drawing Biennial 2015 artists to ensure that their works go to a good home”

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An appeal from Drawing Room Co-directors Mary Doyle and Kate Macfarlane, and new information on some of the works in Drawing Biennial 2015

“This year is our seventh Drawing Biennial and we are proud that over the years it has evolved from a fundraiser into one of the most significant exhibitions in our programme. The Drawing Biennial exhibitions continue to bring together an amazing line up of artists, representing a myriad of ideas and approaches to drawing from around the world today. We recognise that artists are asked, increasingly, to support and donate to galleries, and we are indebited to all the artists who have so readily agreed to be in the exhibition and support us by generously donating their works. The Drawing Biennial is our core funding and without their generosity our programme would not have been possible over the last 14 years. We owe it to the artists to ensure that their works go to a good home. By bidding in our online auction you are helping us achieve that goal, while supporting artists’ reputations and raising funds to continue our support of artists’ contemporary drawing practice.”  Mary Doyle and Kate Macfarlane, Drawing Room Co-directors.

Below is new information we have received on some of the works in Drawing Biennial 2015

In Belen Uriel's Para Calcar (To Trace) we are presented with an array of Modernist buildings and imagery, using the artist’s signature technique of drawing onto carbon paper which makes visible the traces of the transfer process and entails the artist working ‘blind’, drawing attention to the capacity of images to impose social models and habits.

Working with a range of materials and fabrication processes Rob Chavasse's work often references existing artworks. In Water Witching, Bill Viola’s name ripples under the surface of the water, affecting in and out of focus and slippage off the page. Captured as a photograph this transient effect is then printed using a risograph for its high-speed digital printing process. A recurring theme in his work is boundaries, where the edges of an artwork can fall/dissolve. 

Kelly Chorpening's drawing An Old Master relates to a series created for a recent exhibition at Horatio Jr. A Union of Voices where artists’ created books. The drawing relates to the Horatio Jr. book containing a series of drawings depicting the backs of old master paintings, that reveal evidence of their provenance or conservation. This interest in the backs of paintings, in a roundabout way, derives from an intriguing detail in Giotto’s Franciscan Cycle in Assisi (1297-1300) where a cross is depicted from behind. It’s a slim object where one side is meaningful and important, but what we see is surprisingly mundane.  

Sam Austen's  The Hot Glass Tourist’s Dream began as a drawing of a hand on one side of the paper which is pulled through a photocopier to create a mirrored image, then drawn on and re-photocopied until you get repeated images. Using the outmoded photocopier the drawing is like film speed with slight nuances of change, affecting a hallucinogenic image. Austen’s work is mainly moving image and objects.  His analogue films are made up of collaged images of constructed 2d and 3d objects, drawings, words and sounds.  He is interested in the materiality of analogue film as opposed to digital, and drawing being part of the manual process in the moving image. 

Jamie George's drawing is one of the most abstracted works in his White Flag series which examines notions of adolescence and objecthood and uses xerographic printing tinted with wallpaper paste.

Marianna Simnett's Fake is one of many pencil drawings made by the artist.  It relates directly to her new film Blood which was a joint winner of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2015.  The nose becomes the locus of transformation and metaphor in this Surrealist film which uses the phenomenon of Albanian sworn virgins as an exploration of sexual identity. 

Laura Eldret's Plan for a Rug #artistimpression reflects on stereotypes of art making, and features motifs of pens, pencils and perspectival lines. The drawing is also a proposal for an art work in the form of a rug. Eldret has recently spent time in a Zapotec community in Mexico, where she has designed and commissioned a series of woollen rugs that combine her own observations and research interests with the makers’ life stories and anecdotes. This works relates to Eldret's project which opens and closes the Fig 2 programme at ICA, London.

Viktor Timofeev's practice combines drawing, digital and sculptural work.  He is a prolific draughtsman but also makes computer games and browser based collage puzzles without instructions.  His drawing for Drawing Biennial 2015 is looser, more expressionistic, an interesting new development in his drawing practice.

David Osbaldeston's  A Note about Imprecision is a humorous and thought-provoking work that is a summation of Osbaldeston’s ongoing quest to debunk the language of science and certainty.  His signature cut and paste technique and wry sense of humour creates a work that is visually rich and brain teasingly cryptic.

Rob Halverson's  drawing flips the relationship between artwork and viewer – here the artwork looks out at us.  The folded paper suggests a state of flux in which the eye can blink and swivel.  This intriguing and thought-provoking drawing relates to “THE LIST GROWS EYEBALL”, a text work by Halverson in which he describes in words the pressures on the eye ball.  

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