Marking Language

Marking Language  Drawing Room London

10 Oct - 14 Dec 2013

www.drawingroom.org.uk

sunset on the Rich Estate where Drawing Room is

'Marking Language' at Drawing Room London is an exhibition that is running parallel to 'Drawing Time Reading Time' at Drawing Center New York.

At Drawing Center the focus is when language began to be used in art in the 1960s. This is a useful reference point for the exhibition here in London where seven artists from around the world use language in an innovative non-linear manner.

Pavel Buchler subverts linguistic communication to challenge stereotypes.

Johanna Calle transcribes phonetic tribal languages using an adaptive typewriter and ledger paper to reflect the powerlessness and bureaucracy that impacts tribal people.

Annabel Daou looks at the power of utterance and how phonetic transliteration affects communication and explores drawing as performance.

Matias Faldbakken references Reinhardt to make work which is more about ideas than materials. Words have ambiguity and he moves towards the illegible and irrational.

Karl Holmqvist sets language free by creating concrete poems in book form, wall drawings and sculpture.

Bernardo Ortiz uses the act of drawing to transcribe poems into works that resemble musical scores with repeated motifs and themes.

Shahzia Sikander explores the act of translation creating a work with many layers of language.

The works created for this exhibition show language in a non-linear form, striped of its authority and power. We see the beauty of a line of words, a block of text and a single letterform.

I liked the graphic impact of the work by Karl Holmqvist because of its scale and starkness: the black letterforms were drawn directly onto the wall using magic marker. The content of these concrete poems comes from a variety of sources because he believes that language is acquired and not our own. We quote and requote all the time and so Holmqvist adopts this technique to source his material. His poems employ a play on language to make social comments.

 Karl Holmqvist Untitled (Lettriste Sculpture) 2013

  Karl Holmqvist Untitled (Wall Drawing) 2013  (part of)

  Karl Holmqvist Untitled (Lettriste  Sculpture) 2013 with book of concrete poetry in the foreground and part of Untitled (Wall Drawing) 2013 in the background