Category Archives: 2019

from line to surface – preview Thursday 4.07.2019

5.07.2019 – 20.07.2019. opening times Saturday 2 – 6 pm and by appointment

during July RAUMX is presenting four contemporary drawing positions . What all positions have in common are to work in non-representational processes and in a wider sense are recording condensed structures within their working process.

Nelleke Beltjens, Road to travel#5; 2019

Nelleke Beltjens

Nothing ever stays the same; nothing is essentially solid.

My drawings are meticulously built-up works on paper, which combine elements of ink, watercolor, and “sculpturally” cut and reinserted fragments. One of my primary interests in my work is that there is a complexity that is not foreseeable. I like to call my drawings ‘worlds’, or ‘manifestations’. I build up a ‘world’ with tiny ink pen marks and watercolor, only to “destroy” – or better stated, to “open up” – what I just created by cutting through the paper and moving parts around so new unexpected possibilities start to appear.  This processual appearing and disappearing interests me. It’s like an infinite coming and going; what disappears in this ‘world’ enters again in another. Perhaps nothing is ever really lost and with every thought comes the beginning of a new manifestation.

I am interested in the idea of responsibility; or more precisely, the idea of being responsible for everything that one puts in motion. Hence, though actions may have unforeseen consequences, this also means that they hold enormous possibility. I believe there is a “fiction” to the visible manifested world, or what I call a “necessary illusion”. I am interested in this illusion as it is a way to practice life as a possibility. Ongoing ever-changing manifestations, however illusory, nevertheless have a ‘materiality’ depending on how our actions are changed because of them. Such are ideas that conceptually as well as intuitively fuel the decisions and possibilities I confront in my work.   

Anna Mossman

Anna Mossman, Diagonal Lines, 2011-2012
3130 x 1510mm, ink on paper. – Detail

Anna Mossman is a London based artist. Her 
work explores aspects of duration and mechanical reproduction in the broadest 
sense, often in relation to the hand-made. Engaging with the copy, repetition, 
pattern and variation, she works primarily with the drawn, photographed,
 written and painted. The works foreground absence and
 imperfection, frequently through the use of drawing in relation to an initial line, geometric shape or point. Works evolve through repetition, allowing variation 
and imperfection within initial structures, questioning our 
perception of space, surface and the object, forming visually ambiguous fields.

Large drawings such as ‘Diagonal Lines’ 2011-12 and ‘Curved Lines’ 2012-15 (see website: annamossman.com), use an apparently simple starting point but function similarly to the writing of a novel in the extended duration of their production. Recent works shown here develop aspects of these and also of      the ‘Imagined Legacy’ series ‘IL1-21’, 2015-16, which play more specifically with a language of geometric abstraction. Beginning with a diagonal structure, transparent layers are juxtaposed in relation to the drawn line, producing    optical and spatial disorientation, echoing and revitalizing aspects of the photographic, playing with light, focus, exposure and filtration.

Andrea Schoenborn

Andrea Schoenborn, Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis; (Graphite on paper; ongoing series; dimensions variable)

Extract from: “Notes on the series of works by Andrea Schoenborn: Metamorphosis”

John Ruskin, in Stones of Venice (1851), stated: “The arrangement of colours and lines is analogous to the composition of music and entirely independent of the representation of facts.”

Andrea Schoenborn, in her introduction to Metamorphosis and in her artist statement, gives us an insight into how her creative drives form her practice. I encourage you to read it.

The metamorphosis of inanimate material to life is driven by Andrea’s will to connect. A hand holding a stick of graphite making marks on a sheet of paper is as close as the artist can get to transmitting cognitive sensual feelings – to connect skin to skin. The simple means of Andrea’s works belie their complexity, which is as much a result of what is not as what is. In the powerful, unequivocal presence of the work, a kaleidoscope of what has been eliminated by the maker is simultaneously experienced by the viewer, leaving them with a sensation of being in the presence of an other. Indeed the material, the body, has been metamorphosed into an essence, a personification; the invisible is made visible, tangible!

The selection of materials and the processes she describes have evolved through a journey of continuous experimentation to reveal her truth, to connect – uncluttered by conceptual aesthetics. She finds validation in her practice in the authenticity of her feelings, mirrored in the moment by moment applications of her touch.

A Gestalt interpretation comes to mind when viewing and thinking about Andreas’s works: here the interplay, the appearance of parts, is determined by wholes; what is being communicated in her works is a wholeness of being!  In this respect the material used becomes irrelevant, superseded by a sensation.

Sotirakis Charalambou.

Irene Weingartner

Irene Weingartner, Landschaftskonstruktion 01

The Drawings are called Recordings

Irene Weingartner developed a technique that enables her, not to draw what is in her imagination or in front of her eyes, but what may be unseen, hidden or underneath the surface.With her technique, she produces various series, which are called Seismographic Recording originated from the body or …from the Environment, etc. Therefore she does recordings of signals.

To do her Recordings, Weingartner is developing different systems. She uses those to find an accurate attitude before she starts her drawing process. Depending on the approach, she – in a way – ‘calibrates’ her body. To her, it is a method for changing attitude and posture. This process influences the quality of the applied lines on paper. The rhythm does form the relation between the lines.Through this practice, fragile and energetic works come into being. Structures arise, that one may be reminded of architectural constructions.

On the bases of these recordings, Irene Weingartner is evolving new techniques such as making transparency-paper-cut-outs and building architectural-like models. She sometimes collaborates with scientists from different fields to discuss and develop the topic of imaging method.

Katrina Blannin and Volker Saul

26.04. – 11.05.2019

Preview Thursday 25.04.2019 from 6pm

RAUMX is starting 2019 with two artists who will show recent works on paper. London based Katrina Blannin will show prints and German Volker Saul is showing his paper cuts.

Volker Saul 4

Cut, painted and layered paper

The designs for the paper cuts come about as freehand drawings on standard DIN A4 pages. Using a fineliner pen, I draw lines that come together as form, with no preliminary draft, planning or correction; ideas for forms develop during the drawing act as an individual form or as a sequence of several forms on the page. A selection of these configurations is transferred by projection to larger pages and then cut out using a scalpel. For further treatment I use both what has been cut out and the surface from which the cut has been made.

The paper cuts constitute the raw material for the subsequent painterly processes, for which I leave sufficient room for chance. I work on the front and reverse sides with color. Most often, it is possible to use both sides. In addition to the cuts, I paint uncut papers; later, these serve as backgrounds.

All of these papers enter the pool for the assignings I ultimately carry out. Strata are built up in layers of two to five cuts, each layer being a picture element of equal value – regardless of what or how much of it will be visible in the finished work. The picture elements have come about independently of one another. There is no hierarchy. The compilations may be changed during each phase of work.

Thus, the assignments take place throughout the entire time the series is developed, in a long process of trying out, checking, discarding, and reassigning. As it originates, the series forms a body of individual parts that may be flexibly combined. In a final step, I affix the layers to one another. The open process has been halted. As a result, each finished work is precisely whatever it is. But everything could also be very different.

Volker Saul, Cologne in August 2018

Katrina Blannin
print
Katrina Blannin, print

“The process of experimenting with simple systems, as well as palindromic and isochromatic structures, aims to produce paintings with a logical clarity; both spatial and material in character. Methodologies for reading historical paintings are re-examined and transformed into new visual investigations which in turn ask questions about the concrete and constructivism in art; reflexively generating new modes of apprehension.”

Katrina Blannin is an artist based in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1997 and has since then shown her work extensively in the UK and abroad; co-directed artist run project spaces; curated exhibitions and written about contemporary painting. She is currently undertaking a practice based Painting PhD at the University of Worcester, teaches at Camberwell UAL  and Canterbury UCA and and works for the editorial board and the mentoring programme for Turps Banana, London, UK.