ALIGNED

Massimo Bartolini, Tacita Dean, John Morris, Giuseppe Penone and Kathy Prendergast

14th May - 26th June

Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition which examines five very different approaches to contemporary drawing. Aligned brings together a group of artists working in a broad variety of disciplines and themes, yet for all of them the act of drawing remains at the core of their practice.

Massimo Bartolini's works are closely connected with the artist's own surroundings. In his drawings he employs a visual language that is highly communicative and rich in meaning. Many of his pieces create an interface between the man-made and the natural world. In this exhibition he will exhibit a number of beautiful drawings inspired by his own garden in Italy.

Tacita Dean's alabaster drawings are created using the natural grain of this soft and opaque rock. By subtly inscribing the random, organic lines Dean somehow exposes a hidden world of signs, meaning and stories within an apparently lifeless material.

John Morris' drawings are astonishing in their near microscopic delicacy. At the same time they are witty and highly inventive in the ways they play with composition and art historical influences. Some tightly controlled, almost robotically repetitive in their imagery, others more freehand in their doodling, the drawings evoke man-made and natural phenomena, among them patterns from nature, electronic circuitry, virus colonies, human cells and musical notations.

Giuseppe Penone first achieved recognition for his work associated with the Arte Povera movement in Italy in the 1960s, in which artists worked using materials from daily life such as sand, earth, stones, fabric and newspapers. Penone often makes use of these simple materials in order to push the boundaries between art and nature. His drawings form part of a process of open-ended experimentation showing connections among all organic life.

Kathy Prendergast works in a huge variety of materials; string, wool, eggs, paint, photography, fabric, found objects and human hair. She is known for her elegant, almost ghostly drawings of city street plans. These pieces are much more than representations of a physical landscape, they somehow communicate the life of the city. In the exhibition Kathy will show a series of large works depicting the outlines of the lakes of Canada. Each work contains the individual profile of the thousands of separate bodies of water; displaced from their original context they are both enigmatic and incredibly evocative.

 

© 2004 Frith Street Gallery