International Drawing highlights this month

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Tim Gardner, Untitled ( Family Portrait 1 ) 2005, pastel on gessoed paper mounted on canvas

303 GALLERY, New York

TIM GARDNER

Tim Gardner’s new work consists of larger than life-sized pastel portraits based on photographs found in his family ‘s archive. This body of work depicts two family portraits and several individual portraits.

Known primarily for his watercolors of boys striving to become men, Gardner’s new work continues to investigate identity by looking more closely at his own past. Earlier, fraternal references were made metaphorically as in “Untitled (Soldiers)”, 2002, a watercolor of three young service men from the Vietnam Memorial or “Untitled (Waterloo Siskins)”, 2003, of a hockey team from Gardner’s hometown. Further exploration has turned Gardner’s attention to more personal subjects –these portraits depict Gardner and his brothers at varying ages.

Flowers, New York

Peter Howson : Christos Aneste

Peter Howson has established a formidable reputation as one of his generation's leading figurative painters. Many of his paintings derive inspiration from the streets of Glasgow, where he was brought up. He is renowned for his penetrating and vigorous insight into the human condition, and his heroic portrayals of the mighty and meek. In 1992 he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, an event which changed his perspective entirely.

"Peter Howson's work tends to arrest you in your tracks; it grabs you by the throat and then leaves you feeling quite different to the way you were before. His bodies flow in a horrendous voluptuous twist of flesh, like think-coded branches of trees. They seem almost torn out of the earth itself; it's as if they were heaved from its bowels. He paints in a style that reminds you of Breughel and William Blake, using terrible mythic figures as he puts the modern world into his fables." - Steven Berkoff 2002

Peter Howson, Origen 2005, Pencil on gessoed panel, 22 x 21 cms / 8¾ x 8¼ ins

INGRID CALAME : New Drawings

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by California-based artist Ingrid Calame. ‘Ingrid Calame: New Drawings’ consists of works on mylar —some as large as eleven by seven feet— that are ruminations on time, place, and the human presence.

Calame has said, "Color for me is a trigger for thoughts and memories", which is readily apparent in her new vibrant and complex drawings, generated by her unorthodox method of tracing silhouettes of stains -urban residue - found on the streets of Los Angeles. These stains are small random events recovered by Calame and reordered into striking layered "constellations" of abstract forms drawn with grease pencil on mylar, wedding color and form, order and chaos, into topographies.

VICKI SHER – Nature Walk

Vicki Sher explores the role of violence in nature and everyday life in over thirty drawings that range from suburban crime scenes to still lives of poisonous mushrooms, from children wandering beneath soaring helicopters to portraits of her grandparents in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Setting out these disparate elements, Sher’s image library investigates fear’s ability to illicit anxiety, dread and excitement.

In Smile (2005) a prepubescent girl sports a souvenir T-shirt with a wolf. The girl’s likeness floats on the sheet of paper while the wolf’s image is printed on the white T-shirt. Drawn with a similar gesture, the girl and the wolf are rendered with equal attention -their smiling mouths bear teeth, and eyes squint beneath thick black hair. Somewhere between wild and tamed, nature fights to hold onto the girl’s undomesticated childhood.

Vicki Sher, Smile, 2005. Colored pencil, ink, and gouache on paper, 15 x 22 inches

Rokeby, London

Zoe Mendelson - P's and Q's

Zoe Mendelson creates a seductive world. Her drawings, paintings and painted installations entice the viewer into an elaborate fantasy of intricately rendered imagery and embellishment. Drawn into the artist's world, one delights in realising that the idealised innocence and gentility act as a cover for excess and the work exposes itself as being politely and furtively soiled. Overlapping opulent historical settings with Vegas-style signage and low-budget erotica, Mendelson deals with obsession and fantasy; often concealing erotic imagery behind elaborate symbolic constructions, which, in turn can be found buried within customised antique or museum style furniture.

With no central compositional focus, the viewer jumps and skips across the work in an attempt to piece together elaborate narratives which refuse to offer conclusive endings. Playing in these sumptuous, yet corrupted, period dramas are female characters that remain hollowed out line drawings. The girls' poses and expressions, drawn from the mechanical repertoire of adult entertainment, suggest a less than polite life devoid of any substance. Not intended to shock these girls act as moments when the disingenuous ideal of good-mannered femininity collapses. Within their opulent bourgeois settings the girls embody contradictory sets of ideas concerning our most basic impulses, desires, and anxieties.

Adam Helms, NFA combatant #3, 2005 11x8 in, graphite on paper

Sister, Los Angeles

Adam Helms : Brothers Keeper

Drawing Exhibitions April 2005

Artspace Virginia Miller Galleries, Miami : Hugo Crosthwaite - Maniera obscura : 4 Mar to 30 May 2005

Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin : Raymond Pettibon - New Works : 1 Apr to 30 Apr 2005

Drawing Room, London : Loose Ends: the drawings of Lucia Nogueira :19 Mar to 26 June 2005

Gitte Weise Gallery Sydney : MARIA KONTIS : Drawings : 6 Apr to 14 May 2005

Jablonka Galerie, Cologne : PABLO PICASSO : FEMMES DRAWINGS 1971 : 8 Apr 2005 to 28 May 2005

Zink & Gegner, Munich : Marcel van Eeden : 17 Mar 2005 to 30 Apr 2005

For an A - Z of all current listings, please click "Exhibitor" then "search" on any re-title page.