 |
| © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002 |
This display presents over 120 drawings and nearly 30 prints from the Tate Collection. It spans the eighteenth century to the 1980s and features artists such as Joshua Reynolds, William, Blake, Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Aubrey Beardsley, Man Ray, Francis Bacon, Kurt Schwitters, Eileen Agar, Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol.
The overall connection between this group of diverse works by artists from Britain, Europe and North America is the proposition that drawing is an open-ended and exploratory activity, or ‘a generative space of thought’. The aim of the exhibition is to reflect upon what drawing can be, that is the materialisation by means of gestural acts, of the process, the movements, rhythms and ruminations of the mind; the operations of thought.
The exhibition is selected from the Tate Collection by British artist Avis Newman, and curated by Catherine de Zegher, Director of The Drawing Center in New York. Newman was invited to present a selection of drawings from the Tate on the strength of her sensitivity to the medium of drawing, informed as it is by the importance of drawing within her own practice. Newman has long approached drawing as what she identifies as ‘an act of consciousness’ – the affirmation that ‘I am conscious, I exist’ which is marked in a trace left by the gesture on the page.
|
