The Body of Drawing #1- The Touch of Density

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The Body of Drawing #1- The Touch of Density

James Bockelman, Hanna Hennenkemper, Edgar Knobloch, 
Anke Röhrscheid, Nora Schattauer

Curated by Hanna Hennenkemper and Ludwig Seyfarth

11th. February – 30th. April 2020

Six memos for the Next Millennium, composed by the Italian writer Italo Calvino in 1985, are reflections on writing and the future of literature. They are a profound plea on behalf of the intellectual and illustrative power of art, and its ability to seem to describe the world partly in terms of ever-changing material qualities, and partly in terms of aggregate states: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency.

In the chapter about lightness, Calvino describes “two opposite tendencies,” which “throughout the centuries ... have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.”[1]

Is the tension between these two tendencies not also visible in the fine arts and particularly in drawing and graphics – the field which the exhibition series “The Body of Drawing” is dedicated to? If one consciously considers the “graphical” from perspectives other than those generally accepted and often biased approaches dominated by ‘line’, then just as in Calvino’s observations on literature, a spectrum of various textures emerges. Not least among these, artistic approaches emerge which are distinguished by an interest in volume and corporeality. 

This can take place on three levels. Firstly, one’s gaze is directed to the ‘body’ of the drawing, which consolidates as a physical presence on or out of the pictorial surface; this is the aspect which the first of these exhibitions, “The Touch of Density”, focusses upon. Secondly, the direct marks left by the physical action allude to the body of the artist. The human body also comes into play as pictorial representation. The series title, however, also includes body in the sense of ‘corpus’, meaning the total holdings of a collection covering a particular topic, such as the topic of drawing. 

The Body of Drawing #1- The Touch of Density

James Bockelman, Hanna Hennenkemper, Edgar Knobloch, 
Anke Röhrscheid, Nora Schattauer
 

Curated by Hanna Hennenkemper and Ludwig Seyfarth

11th. February – 9th. April 2020

Opening Reception:
Monday, 10th. February 2020, from 7PM to 10PM. The artists will be in attendance.

Introduction: Ludwig Seyfarth (Author and Curator)

Artist Talk:
Monday, 30th. March 2020,  7 pm with Dr. Petra Roettig (Director Contemporary Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle), Hanna Hennenkemper, Nora Schattauer and Ludwig Seyfarth
The artist talk is postponed!

For further information please e-mail: contact@drawingroom-hamburg.de

Opening hours: Tuesday to Thursday 12PM – 7PM and by appointment

[1] Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Harvard lectures. Translated from the Italian, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p. 15.