The Central Line

19 January – 3 March 2007

 
  Rose Wylie, Footballer (5) from Footballer Series   Gail Henderson, Alice's World, 2004-2006 Ansel Krut, Singing Maggot, 2004    Morgan O'Hara, Kung Fu Battle, 2005
Rose Wylie, Footballer (5)
from Footballer Series
1995-6		 Gail Henderson
Alice's World,
2004-2006		 Ansel Krut
Singing Maggot, 2004		 Morgan O'Hara
Kung Fu Battle, 2005
 

The Central Line comprises two exhibitions focusing on drawing, at a time of real resurgence of interest in the medium.

At PM Gallery, ‘Drawing as Vital Practice’ is a vivid look at the work of ten international artists, whilst ‘ Petherbridge Alone With Soane’, showing in Pitzhanger Manor-House, is a collection of Deanna Petherbridge’s complex pen and wash drawings, reflecting the artist’s fascination with international architectural traditions.

Together the exhibitions provide a broad and significant contribution to the debate about the importance of drawing to artistic practice

Drawing as Vital Practice
Drawing as Vital Practice includes works ranging from large-scale unstretched canvas pieces to groups of small drawings and short films.

Rose Wylie’s small images of footballers and portraits capture the passing world with an acutely innocent but knowing and humorous gaze. Ansel Krut’s witty and sometimes angry carnivalesque drawings of hybrid figures - part human, part animal, part object - are arranged in
narrative sequences.

Dilip Sur creates a poetic world of stains and marks and primal rhythms, whilst Gail Henderson uses mixed media and collage to explore personal obsessions in intense linear drawings.

Felicity Powell’s animation Anima and Anthony Auerbach’s Tailoring Alterations Repairs, both look at processes of making and unmaking, whilst Joanna Quinn uses wild humour and close observation to draw narratives on the joys and sorrows of real life in Dream and Desires:
Family Ties.

Morgan O’Hara responds in public to real-life situations, allowing the rhythms and movements of outside activities to direct the many pencils she holds in both hands, resulting in abstract ‘ live transmission’ drawings.

John McNorton ‘choreographs’ large-scale collaborative drawings with other participants, encouraging them to use their whole bodies in the action of mark-making. There is an opportunity to participate in a John McNorton workshop in February.

Petherbridge Alone With Soane

Deanna Petherbridge, The Fountains of Suleimein, 1974    Deanna Petherbridge, In Media Res: Tate Turbine Hall No 2, 1996
Deanna Petherbridge,
The Fountains of
Suleimein, 1974		 Deanna Petherbridge,
In Media Res:
Tate Turbine Hall No 2, 1996

Deanna Petherbridge is an artist whose practice, writings and teaching are centered around drawing.  Architecture has always been a very important element of her work, and her experiences of grand monuments and village architecture of other cultures, including India and the Muslim world, have served to enrich an eclectic vocabulary of forms.

The built environment directly reflects the cultures and social conditions of the people who inhabit them, and Petherbridge employs transformed details, contrasts of light and dark and reconfigured architectural spaces to comment on human situations, sometimes directly political, or to evoke the experience of different cultures or named cities.

Deanna Petherbridge has always admired Sir John Soane as an architect, thinker and visionary and Pitzhanger Manor-House therefore provides a unique and fitting setting for her works. 

Deanna Petherbridge will be in conversation with critic and writer, Brian Sewell in February.