“Eyes Wide Shut" Exhibition
Johannes Vogt Gallery
This event has ended.
Vogt Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of contemporary German drawing. The exhibition shows how artistic perception emerges from within, almost as if the eyelids were closed, while opening up an enormous potential of imagery.
Within contemporary art production, drawing as a medium is more popular than ever. The times have clearly passed when drawing served only as a draft or conceptual sketch for a larger scale work or a room-sized installation, where it was subordinate to the finished artwork. For contemporary artists, drawing is a completely autonomous medium.
Some artists such as Ralf Ziervogel, Marc Brandenburg, and Raimond Pettibon work solely on paper, applying ink, watercolor, charcoal, pen, and pencil, whether colored or simply black. They create projections or interventions that lie beyond the mimetic and also bear specific challenges: nowhere is the artist as naked as when it comes to hand drawings; nowhere else are his intentions and motivations communicated clearer and more directly than in the field of drawing. No post-edits or alterations are allowed: a cosmos of imagination arises from just a few lines, where word and image can mingle easily, and subversive energies are set free.
In no other medium can we grasp the imaginary, let our gaze unveil the profanity of real life, as we do in drawing. At the same time, the direct expression of the artistic spirit through the drawing utensils and the speed with which subjective impulses can be translated onto paper enables artists to use drawing to cut through the superficial layers that muddle things and actions. The exhibition brings together a selection of artists who live in Germany and whose mutual focus is the rise of drawing and the substantial discourse with the technique it allows. The artists presented explore the ideas of metaphysics in a post-industrial society.
Perceiving with closed eyelids opens a wider horizon of a parallel existence, governed by geometric constellations and bizarre reflexes bordering the psychedelic. The sleep of reason produces not only monsters, as Goya noted, but also sets free the enormous potential of phantasmagorical imagery.
[Image: Florian Meisenberg, from the series "You want reality unmasked? Choose death!" (2010) (Detail), bleach on cloth 113.5 x 100 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 15, 2011 to October 29, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-15 from 18:00 to 20:00