Vital Signs: Drawing in Uncertain Times

Vital Signs: Drawing in Uncertain Times

Online talk Thu 24 June 2021

Join Drawing Biennial 2021 artists Aideen Barry, Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Nicole Morris & Markus Vater in conversation with Drawing Room Exhibitions Manager Jacqui McIntosh. Taking their contribution to the Biennial as a starting point, this conversation will focus on the importance of drawing to each artist and explore how the massive shifts in the world this past year have affected ways of working and thinking about their roles as artists.

About the artists

Born 1979 Cork, Aideen Barry lives and works in Ireland. Barry is an Irish visual artist, whose means of expression are interchangeable, incorporating film, performance, drawing, sculpture, installation and experimental lens based media. Her work is predominately preoccupied with ideas of otherness, and what Freud coined ‘Das Unheimliche’. She uses psychological ploys of cognitive dissonance to disarm the viewer with slapstick humour as a way of discussing the intensely personal and provoke alternative perspectives on dark subject matter: mental illness, oppression and patriarchy.

Born 1991 Lagos, Richard Ayodeji Ikhide lives and works in London. Ikhide creates paintings and drawings inspired by his Nigerian heritage as well as his interest in other civilizations and mythologies. The works have a figurative core, but they are completed with colorful abstract gestures and patterns. According to Ikhide, 'Many cultural histories converge in my work. During the course of my life, I have absorbed a lot of information, and when I make work, I intuitively respond to it and my life experiences. In doing so, I aim to bring together past, present and future as well as multiple geographies and cultures.'

Born 1986 Bedford, Nicole Morris lives and works in London. Morris works across exhibition, education and community contexts, using textiles and film to explore methods of performance and collaboration.

Born 1970 Düsseldorf, Markus Vater lives and works in London. The art exhibited by Vater often includes a mixture of courtesy and rebellion. Pictorial and textual notations of things seen, felt or dreamt are condensed diary-like into their own cosmos. Dark desperation emerges which aligns the imagined or moral impossibility but also includes childish and sentimental elements. The flow of Vater’s consciousness is neither impeded by dreamy inanities, nor by a caustic extrapolation of contemporary inhumanity. His work is held in public and private collections including Graphic Collection of the Museum Kunstpalast Duesseldorf, Collection of the Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen, Collection Willi Michel of the Franz Gertsch Museum Switzerland, and Falkenberg Collection Hamburg.