Archives: cabinet de dessins

“Aurelie Nemours’ collages are a surprise. Visual. Plastic. Poetic. For those who are used to, a little distractedly, to the artist’s geometric works of line – horizontal, vertical – and point, to her black and white as rigorous as they are sensual, to her vibrant flat tints of monochrome colours, to the deep, velvety void of a repeated infinity that she unfolds from series to series, her collages from 1965 and 1968, produced at the request of Imre Pan for the editions he tirelessly designed, interwoven, rhizomatic, fragmented, and whose titles he constantly repeated (Signe, Signe Morphèmes, Signe L’art du dessin, L’estampe moderne, Morphèmes, Mini-Musée, Préverbes… ), prove, upon discovery, to be sets of a singular unity and, above all, a fruitful step aside for the artist. “
Marjorie Miccuci

Exploring the border between painting and sculpture, Elodie Seguin’s (b. 1984) work is intrinsically linked to the spaces in which it is exhibited. Her installations and murals integrate the specific dimensions and configurations of each site to “make place” with it. They blend with volumes and surfaces, the space becoming the interpretative framework of the work as much as it is interpreted by it.

Painted with brushes on paper but designed to be spatialized, the works belonging to the White Volume series are the result of a long research on the interactions between luminosity and colour. They represent pyramids seen from above whose volume is materialised by subtly orchestrated juxtapositions of colours that describe the interactions of the four faces of the pyramid with projected light. Each composition describes a specific light situation, the play of colours inviting contemplation as much as analysis.

Elodie Seguin’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions such as the MACBA in Buenos Aires, the MUDAM (Luxembourg), the French Cultural Centre in Milan, the Pernod Ricard Foundation (Paris), the Espace Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), the Frac Bretagne, or the MUCEM (Marseille).

Born in Le Havre in 1927, Colette Brunschwig was about twenty years old when she moved to Paris in 1945 to study painting. Marked by a conflict she had lived through in hiding and by the trauma of the Shoah, she did her apprenticeship during the immediate post-war period, which was akin to a “year zero” for artists confronted with the scale of the catastrophe. Like many surviving Jewish intellectuals with whom she would maintain links – Emmanuel Levinas, whose seminars she followed, the Hellenist Jean Bollack, who frequented her studio and with whom she corresponded, and Paul Célan, whose poetry she would later illustrate – Colette Brunschwig sought to overcome and transcend the annihilation.

Sensitized to the problems of abstraction by André Lhote (1885-1962), whose teaching she followed from 1946 to 1949, the artist found in abstract painting a possible path and even a logical end, namely the culmination of the trends at work in impressionism and cubism. Her reflection led her from Monet (1840-1926) to Malevitch (1879-1935), from the Water Lilies to the White Square on a White Background, from the dissolution of forms to the total abolition of the image and of all representation. At the end of the 1960s, she discovered the painting of ancient China, the works of scholar painters such as Wang Wei (701-761), Mi Fu (1051-1107) or Shitao (1641-1719), whose fundamental relationship to writing she admired, as well as the aesthetic and philosophical conception of emptiness (understood not in opposition to the full, but in a complementarity between form and formlessness).

Linking Jewish metaphysics, modern abstraction and oriental thought of nothingness, the work of Colette Brunschwig occupies a singular place in the abstract avant-garde. If the artist initially feels close to lyrical abstraction, attracted by the possibility of an art that approaches writing, the production of signs, she will refuse the immediacy of the gesture to introduce into her work a temporal dimension, a game of superimpositions, accumulations and repetitions through which the form emerges. Each gesture covers or extends another. Hashes, strokes, washes, stencils are added in layers, giving birth to depths, to this “third dimension” dear to the artist. The techniques intermingle: Indian ink, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, oil. Recurring motifs emerge, fade away: circles and rectangles structuring the space without any question of geometric composition. All this in a palette that has never excluded color but has often preferred black and especially gray in all its shades.

Work with share, in margin of the other currents. But not isolated in the century, as evidenced by the companionship that linked the artist to Pierre Soulages (1919-2022), André Marfaing (1925-1987), Pierre Courtin (1921-2012), Árpád Szenes (1897-1985), Etienne Hajdu (1907-1996) or Charles Maussion (1923-2010). First exhibited in 1952 at Colette Allendy, Colette Brunschwig has been accompanied by several generations of Parisian galleries throughout her career, including Nane Stern, La Roue, Clivages, Convergences and Jocelyn Wolff.

Abraham & Wolff’s drawing room offers a selection of works from 1950 to 2012, showing the consistency and unity of his work.

  

Closely linked to the history of modern architecture, the work of Isa Melsheimer (born in 1968) has for many years questioned the ideological vision of nature and human existence that underlies the achievements of modernist architects.

Continuing her important work as a ceramist, the artist creates gouaches that depict buildings whose deserted surroundings sometimes see wild animals and enigmatic silhouettes emerge. Her iconography draws from the architectural projects of Claude Parent, Michael Graves, Carl Fingerhuth, Owen Luder or Balkrishna Doshi, whose constructions she reproduces from images gleaned from publications, press clippings or the Internet. Drawing after drawing, Melsheimer pays homage to the stylistic audacity of modernity while at the same time underlining its failures through the omnipresence of concrete, the king material that has become the symbol of an architecture that failed in its quest for progress. 

These images, the artist enamels them with references and innuendos to the history of modernism but also to clothing fashion or mass culture. She thus elaborates representations that are both pessimistic and light, leading us to reflect on our relationship to the living space, the place we occupy in it and the place we leave to the rest of the living. She gives us a glimpse of a disturbing future where we seem to have disappeared, victims of an ultimate crisis, and where only buildings whose utopian ideals are long gone remain as a testimony of our passage.

Oswald Oberhuber (1931-2020), a leading figure on the Austrian art scene, found his first inspiration in the informal art of the post-war period, of which he was one of the co-founders in Austria. At the turn of the 1950s, he produced abstract sculptures in plaster and bronze in which the expressiveness of the material and the spontaneity of the gesture prevail. In 1956, the artist broke with this work and declared that “permanent change” would henceforth be the watchword of his artistic practice as well as a maxim of life. From then on, in a constant effort to unlearn and start again from scratch, he will not cease to engage his work in recurrent transformations, seizing all mediums and passing from one style to another throughout his career. Conceptualism, realism, Pop-influenced paintings, assemblages and collages, political posters, the ideas follow one another, the artist creates image upon image, object upon object, with the common thread of the negation of aesthetic and social norms.

But the importance of Oswald Oberhuber is not only measured by this abundant and rebellious work. A tireless gallery owner and prolific exhibition organizer, he has led more than 600 projects, some of which have been important innovations in contemporary Austrian art. As a professor and rector of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, he also had a significant influence on the cultural and educational policies of his country, shaping the artistic practices of several generations. 

Oberhuber’s international recognition came in the form of his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1972, Documenta 6 (1977) and Documenta 7 (1982), and the São Paulo Biennale in 1983.

Abraham&Wolff are pleased to exhibit in collaboration with the KOW Gallery in Berlin a selection of drawings whose very diverse inspirations and styles bear witness to the free temperament of their author.

Laura Lamiel (born in 1948) is best known for her poetic installations in the form of delimited spaces in which materials and objects charged with emotional resonance are arranged according to an enigmatic logic, but she has maintained a practice of drawing throughout her career. 

Some of them have recently appeared in the artist’s installations, first in tension with other objects, then more independently. The development of a piece entitled Forclose (2018) was notably the occasion for Laura Lamiel to elaborate a series of motifs whose production she describes thus: “I decided to unfold this piece (Forclose) and I started to make drawings that took on their autonomy. I made them, for several months, late at night. I had the energy, but I had to wait for it to arrive, I had to have the right gesture. I prepare the inks and the papers, and then there comes a moment in the night when it’s right, I can go, and it can last two or three hours. I started to draw a whole vocabulary of languages; I rushed through sheets of paper, smearing them (…), opening my mouth, making heads, rhizomes, plants come out.” (Interview with François Piron, in LL, Paris, Paraguay Press, 2019). It emerges a certain violence of this impulsive set also constituted by lungs, hands, faces taken in interlacing features. A violence that is accentuated by the systematic use of a red ink that evokes the energy of blood. 

This asceticism of work, the artist had already practiced in a series of large circular drawings exhibited in 2013 as part of the exhibition Ostinato, dessin, musique : interactions, in Namur. They take the form of myriad pen strokes ritually aligned to form concentric circles. Entitled 3 years, 3 months, 3 days, in reference to the traditional duration of the retreat that aspiring lamas must make in Thibetan Buddhism, these drawings resemble spiritual exercises based on repetition (such as the recurrent chanting of the sacred syllables of the Buddhist mantra Om mani padme hum).

A third series of works entitled W’s Eyes shows pairs of eyes emerging from a haze of black crosshatching. These eyes that Laura Lamiel calls “owl eyes” are part of a research on the theme of the double, the W can indeed be read as the letter V accompanied by its symmetrical reflection – just as the artist’s initials, LL, can evoke this eminently problematic question of reflection and double. They were exhibited in installations deployed in 2019 at the CRAC of Sète, installations that exploited the games of reflections and occultation of one-way mirrors. 

These drawings by Laura Lamiel are exhibited in collaboration with the Marcelle Alix gallery (Paris). 

“What we do comes from life, art always remains in life, it is a contribution to life.” – Katinka Bock

Katinka Bock (born in 1976) is an important artist on the international art scene, living and working in Berlin and Paris. 

Using a wide variety of media (sculptures, films, photographs, artists’ books, or installations…), materials (such as clay, stone, wood, bronze, plants, water, etc.), and techniques (folding, rolling, molding, marking, making an imprint, finding a balance, overturning…), Katinka Bock has been developing since the beginning of the 2000’s an artistic practice that is intimately linked to the issues of space, time, and materials.

Her works take shape in an architectural, urban, social, temporal and environmental context that marks them and that they mark in return. Anxious to make perceptible the particularity of the places in which she intervenes, the work is never for Katinka Bock an end, but a vehicle that leads us to experience time and space. By conceiving works in immediate relation with the latter, she plunges us, with discretion, into the heart of an intimate and poetic journey, which carries us through the history, customs and symbols of a territory.