Only Drawings

Only drawings. Group exhibition with drawings by Cristian Andersen,  Aleksandr Komarov, Silivia Russel and Zak Smith.

Cristian Andersen (Denmark, 1974)
The Zürich based artist, Christian Andersen, uses current symbols and sign language from the field of pop culture. He gets his ideas for his work straight of the street, there where the protagonists experience his pictures. Particular ideas for his work result from observations of everyday life and encounters, resulting from his being himself a part of the street-life of London and New York. The collective material then goes through a process of evaluation. It is decoded, filtered and through new combinations with symbols from different eras of human historic development, is formed into a kind of pop-culture allegory.

Aleksander Komarov (White Russia, 1971)
In the 19th century in Russia portraits have been made of noble people like writers and philosophers. These portraits were executed to show their deepness and their status for the people. Komarov tries to apply the same quality of the classical portraits to heroes of our society. As an artist he considers himself as a participant and voyeur of historical processes.
His heroes are victims, by their fame or by their meaninglessness.
Murders, believes and introverted worlds of madness and suicide provoke him. Komarov is trying to apply their methods into his work to reflect them. By drawing these issues he is searching for the right treatment without intention to cure.

Silvia Russel (Holland, 1969)
The drawings from Silvia Russel (Nijmegen, 1969) are filled with references to her own experiences. She blends phantasy and reality by portraying the characters in spaces and situations full of drama and violence. Fear and the female body are subjects that keep coming back.
Often these themes are approached with absurdism and humour. Russel calls her work 'dairy-drawings'. Sometimes she makes her drawings on small papers from a dairy but she also draws on sheets of paper that are bigger than life-size.

Zak Smith (USA, 1976)
Zak Smith's work moves from sharply rendered poignancy to candy-colored excess. Within a general atmosphere of a dazed freneticism, he offers uncanny and excessive portraits, synthetically luminous abstractions, and somewhat narrative compilations of drawings, which he creates using a unique photo-chemical process. Together, they exist in a world that can't decide whether it's awake or asleep, gorgeous or vaguely psychedelic.
Smith was included in the Whitney 2004 Biennial.