Whitehot Magazine

October 2008, I Can Watch My Thoughts Evolving presented by Dina4 Projekte Muenchen + Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings

October 2008, I Can Watch My Thoughts Evolving presented by Dina4 Projekte Muenchen + Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings
Heike Weber, Bim, 2008, courtesy Dina4 Projekte Muenchen and Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin
I Can Watch My Thoughts Evolving
The drawing lab / Dina4 Projekte München + Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin
October 18 through November 22, 2008 Berlin

In Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings and the Dina4 Projekte’s collaborative drawing lab, I can watch my thoughts evolving, the line is taken for a walk as if in fear that unexercised it might run to fat.

Black felt hoops (Heike Weber, Bim, 2008) spiral across the floor articulating space and these sub lysergic topographies are a recurring trope, with Jasper Sebastian Stürup mapping the headspace of adolescent stoners into a pretty mandala (Some Candy Talking 2008) and Roland Stratmann reducing the mark to a black monofilament, only to twist it into strange orgiastic fantasies, part S&M ritual, part acrobatic night at the circus (Bond series, 2008).

In the far corner lurk two characters, cinematically rendered in charcoal and wash, that might have wandered out of a Beckmann painting. One sports an absurd Dali-esque moustache and rolling eyes (Bas Louter, Max, Robert, 2008). Humour is also evident in a sequence of three small watercolours by Katja Eckert, wherein an infant appears to be attempting some particularly ingenious and ambitious act of self trepanation only to discover that (“oh fuck”) the final image in the sequence is entirely black, save a livid corner of red (Freie Wille Fleisch, 2008).

Elsewhere David Cantoni takes tracings from news images of Afghanistan and Iraq, burning in the line, as if evoking the lens of a magnifying glass (Tricycle, Iraq & Fighter, Afghanistan – 2008). Here, perhaps, the lab’s results are the most prescient, the act of drawing not a study for an action or a posed documentation but rather an action in itself. Not the fetishisation of the mark but a more rigorous and literal fetishising of the act of its making, meditative and ultimately egoless.

This notion of drawing as something obsessive, solitary, an act, almost, of magical self abdignation, is also to be found in Charlotte McGowan Griffin’s impossibly intricate paper cuts (Frost I & II – 2008). Imagining a hyperdetailed, exotic jungle scene, each scalpel incision is a cut away from disaster. The palpable concentration and delicacy of her technique demonstrating that pure escapism is often a hard fought exercise.
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David Selden


Formerly an artist and  gallerist,  David Selden is a freelance writer
living and working in Berlin. He writes about music for dorfdisco.de 
and maintains the blog Unter den roten Geweihen 

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