‘Interface’ at Draw Art Fair

17-19 May at Saatchi Gallery

Marc Bauer, Paul Chiappe, Rachel Goodyear, Margarita Gluzberg, David Haines, Marie Jacotey, Ali Kazim

Drawing Room is an institutional partner of the first edition of Draw Art Fair, the first fair in the UK dedicated to modern and contemporary drawing. Draw Art Fair aims to present all facets of drawing as a fundamental practice and to create a platform where rare works by modern masters and contemporary works will stand side by side.   

At Draw Art Fair Drawing Room will present Interface, an international line up of artists who exploit the expressive capacity of drawing to render faces, both observed and imagined.

The artists are from the UK, France, Pakistan, Switzerland and the former Soviet Union and work in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Glasgow, Lahore, Paris and Zurich. Each has a long-term commitment to the medium of drawing, displayed in their inventive and skilled manipulation of materials.

Three of the artists use distinctive techniques to make portraits of anonymous subjects. Drawn in a way that brings to mind artists of the Italian Renaissance, the figures of David Haines are taken from live chat rooms.

Paul Chiappe’s portraits are based on found classroom photographs, modified and drawn to mimic photographic reproduction.

Ali Kazim’s subjects are from the world around him and drawn from memory, using a unique process in which watercolour pigment is embedded in the dense weave of Wasli, a paper traditionally used in miniature painting.

Margarita Gluzberg brings alive iconography that represents her Soviet past, using multiple, fine pencil lines whilst Marc Bauer uses the blackness of graphite to expose trauma. Both artists exploit the versatility of the medium to explore personal identity and memory.

Marie Jacotey’s sequential dry pastel drawings on Japanese paper use the comic book genre to revisit, in a diaristic mode, events experienced or imagined.

Rachel Goodyear’s surreal female figures are delicately rendered in pencil and ink on paper, a series of mute and blind characters that exist in an unspecified, dream-like realm.

These evocations of personal identity, fantasy and trauma demonstrate that drawing is timeless in its capacity to evoke the contemporary human condition.

For more information please contact Kate Macfarlane [email protected] or Suzie Jones [email protected]