Frith Street Gallery

CRAIGIE HORSFIELD: Irresponsible Drawings

26 September 2003 – 10 November 2003

Related Artists:

Following his latest comprehensive film installation at Documenta XI, Frith Street Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of a new body of work by Craigie Horsfield.

While his remarkable portraits and landscapes, drawn from the social projects throughout Europe (e.g. Barcelona 1996, Rotterdam 1998 and Brussels 2000), were large-scale and black-and-white, the pictures here consist of small, mostly coloured works on paper, drawings, black-and-white and colour photographs, photogravures and photograms. Made over the past year in Horsfield’s studios in New York and London, the works form variations on a set of themes taken from botanical drawings of the 19th century and 20th century plant photography.

As elsewhere, in his film and soundworks for example, these images rely in part on allusion and a fluctuation between the familiar and unfamiliar. The simplicity of the pictures is deceptive – they are built from installations of pigment and materials prepared over many months and form a meditation on medium, material, representation and awareness.

Modest, playful and small in scale the Irresponsible Drawings have at their centre themes which are constants of Horsfield’s work: the evanescence of light, darkness, and the awareness of shaded perception. Things depicted take on a sense of the gravity of the present. The drawings form a study of intimacy in the world of inanimate things and our understanding of them.