UBS Openings: Drawings
selected works from The UBS Art Collection at Tate Modern
The display is the second to be selected by Tate curators from The UBS Art Collection, and explores the immense diversity of drawing as an artistic practice.
Drawing is one of the most basic and ancient of artistic activities. The marking of rock faces served as an expression of shared cultural experience from earliest times. The study of such ritualistic and primeval gestures was one of the many impulses that encouraged mid-twentieth century artists to explore the expressive qualities of mark-making. For admirers of Abstract Expressionism, such marks came to be seen as a real-time record of the artist’s presence, carrying associations of individuality and spontaneous action. The drawings shown here by Franz Kline and Helen Frankenthaler capture a sense of energy and movement with an apparent ease that disguises their fine resolution and balance. The Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti was associated with the Arte Povera movement, who were known for using ‘poor’ everyday or ephemeral materials. The large drawing Aereibelongs to a series known as the ‘Biro works’, which he made using ballpoint pens, often inviting assistants and others to handle the pens themselves. A densely-worked surface of Biro ink becomes an intense blue sky in this exultant, even visionary image.
Drawing serves as a primary means for observation or imagination. Since ancient times it has been used to represent imagined stories. In the western tradition it is seen as a way of recording impressions of the outside world, often with an emphasis on a scrutinising realism that was only partly displaced with the invention of photography. R B Kitaj’s The Poet Writing, for example, captures its subject absorbed in vivid movement, while Lucien Freud’s searching examination of himself achieves a striking intensity.
At the same time, drawing allows the artist to explore and sometimes imaginatively embellish that reality. Philip Guston’s portrait of the artist under a Ku Klux Klan hood seems closer to the fanciful wit of a newspaper cartoonist than to traditional ideas of realism. In its own way, however, it is as thoughtful and questioning as any self-portrait. This imaginative freedom is even more evident in the gleefully satirical drawings of Rosemarie Trockel, which deliberately embrace distortion.
While most of the works here were conceived for public display, drawing, perhaps more than any other medium, has a private function for many artists. It can be the place in which ideas and techniques are developed, perfected, questioned and reconceived. This experimental and multifarious medium encompasses as many practices as there are artists. For many, the act of making marks on paper remains an essential expression of personal experience. It can take on new possibilities with the adoption of a surprising variety of materials such as Ed Ruscha’s use of gunpowder, or Martin Kippenberger’s works on hotel notepaper. At the same time, realism continues to challenge perceptions. This may take the form of perfecting visual illusions that deceive the viewer or, quite differently, in placing recognisable situations or people under scrutiny. The artistic territory between abstraction and realism is populated by possibilities, many of which are exemplified in works on display here.
Ultimately, however, the practice of drawing remains vibrant, individual, complex and, above all, subject to continual re-invention. Drawing challenges the eye and fires the imagination.
Back to Archive / UBS Openings: Drawings (Tate Show)
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