Introduction

Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart is presenting drawings by the artists Dan Perjovschi (Bucharest), Fernando Bryce (Berlin) and Michaël Borremans (Ghent) from April 1 to June 5, 2006. The focus is not on a specific theme but rather on three very different approaches to drawing, which will be presented in an open relation to each other.

The three artists have in common the fact that they create complex narrative spaces with their drawings. Dan Perjovschi’s figures and scenarios, reduced to just a few lines, follow the spontaneous, subversive gestures of caricature and graffiti. He ironically exaggerates current political and social events – as well as the affectations of the art industry. His characters, who inhabit a kind of parallel world, are constantly on our heels, commenting on the disorders and absurdities of a society formulating itself on a global scale.

The works of Fernando Bryce – installations consisting of between a few and hundreds of drawings – are created in a lengthy process of “copying” – or “mimetic analysis”, as Bryce refers to his artistic approach. He copies from historical pictures and texts from the print media: newspapers, magazines, advertisements, cinema posters, etc. In “Revolución”, a work comprising more than 200 drawings, in this way Bryce re-interprets, for example, the history of the revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Michaël Borremans’ small-format pencil, ballpoint, ink and watercolour drawings follow in the footprints of the artistic, scientific and pop culture pictorial traditions of the 19th and early 20th century. He too draws on themes from historical print media. His suggestive, highly aesthetic pictorial worlds are pervaded with surreal and ironical expressions that bring suppressed fantasies and phantasms, pleasure and fear, power and loss of power into play.

In a way, all three artists refer to the potency – and to the hollow spaces – of the reproducible image and information media that they project forward in different ways with their drawings: in the sense of an analysis of social and political conditions that reads between the lines of media superficialities.