Ann Gale, Alex Kanevsky, Edwige Fouvry, Emilio Villalba, Megan Seiter, Robyn Freedman, J. Braman
BEYOND THE LINE
December 10, 2022 - January 28, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 10th, 3-5 PM
Dolby Chadwick Gallery is delighted to announce Beyond the Line, a group exhibition showcasing a selection of drawings by seven exceptional artists. Utilizing a range of materials, from pencil to ink, as well as styles, techniques, and supports, including paper and mylar, the artists demonstrate the rich and limitless possibilities offered by the medium of drawing.
Working with pencil and soft PanPastel, Megan Seiter creates stunningly detailed images of flowers, fruit, and other objects dramatized by lighting and compositional choices. She approaches her subjects in the same way she would a portrait of a person, carefully studying them to capture the subtle nuances that shape their unique character. Her use of realism is, in part, a means of confronting the subjectivity of perspective, with Seiter noting that “no matter how precisely something is rendered, it’s always rendered through the eyes of an individual.” The drawings on view in Beyond the Line expand upon this line of inquiry. Featuring orchids suspended in mid-air with their roots exposed, they were conceived during the pandemic, a period when our understanding of the world and our place in it was upended. “As an artist with a strong proclivity toward botanical still life drawings,” Seiter explains, “I wondered if I could similarly shift our experience of a plant by altering the way we normally see it.”
(Born 1986; lives and works, Oakland)
Robyn Freedman also turns to the wellspring of nature in her practice, favoring PanPastel and charcoal to render the beauty and terror of the sublime through agile shifts in value. She notes: “I am deeply moved by ‘emotional atmosphere,’ and strive to reflect the strong poetic nature of the sky and the way light travels through it.” Her striking value drawings of sky and sea, clouds and water, participate in a lineage that includes Romantic landscape painting and American Tonalism, and yet her drawings are also very much of the contemporary moment. Made in the shadows cast during the past two years, the works harness the duality of dark and light to convey the perennial struggle between despair and hope.
(Born 1967; lives and works, San Francisco)
In Edwige Fouvry’s intimate and evocative portraits, a reliance on line and exposed passages of paper create “openings” within the body that underscore themes of interiority found throughout her oeuvre. Nudity, both full and partial, further enhances the physical and psychological vulnerability of her figures, who are either coupled together in arrangements of quiet affection or presented alone, lost in thought and unaware of—or perhaps unfazed by—our gaze. An alchemy of expressive mark-making in oil pastel and graphite, a heightened use of color, and elements of the Romantic tradition distinguish these extraordinary drawings.
(Born 1970; lives and works, Brussels, Belgium)
The human form is turned inside out in Alex Kanevsky’s works in ink on mylar, which were initially inspired by an x-ray a model once gave him of her broken foot—complete with metal pins. Entranced by the ethereal beauty of the images, Kanevsky set out to create his own suite of transparent bodies. The resulting pieces harness the fluid effects offered by ink as it pools on mylar, evoking photochemical properties and negative imaging. Seen through the veneer of soft flesh, anatomical structures such as bone and fascia become visible, allowing us to experience the captivating simultaneity of interior and exterior.
(Born 1963; lives and works, New Hampshire)
Celebrated for her poignant portraits in oil, Ann Gale also works in graphite, rendering her subjects with the same degree of intimacy and psychological depth as in her paintings. These drawings offer not only a window into her artistic process but also perhaps a more direct view of the bodies and psyches she so closely studies. Gale carves her figures out of negative space, building up layers of line and crosshatching to deftly eschew the rules of contour drawing. Much like energy at the atomic level, the area between these lines holds a charge that dances and quivers.
(Born 1966; lives and works, Seattle)
J.Braman calls upon the properties of ink—specifically, Sumi ink—to express and explore themes that are foundational to her work. In her pursuit of “a space that is inherently symbolic, metaphoric, mutable, where forms are mysterious, changing, unexpected,” Braman appeals to the body, approaching it “as a site for unfolding and emerging selves.” The beings she conceives oscillate between human and animal, masculine and feminine, having origins in this world and in that of our imaginations. They are glimpsed in motion, dancing while also transmuting, “like fleeting shadows.” Braman further invests her drawings with a sense of fluidity and physicality as she hovers over the paper, positioned on the floor, while working with ink, water, and brush.
(Born 1973; lives and works, Berkeley)
Finally, Emilio Villalba’s graphite drawings feature a mix of portraits, which call to mind the penetrating aesthetic of Lucian Freud and Alice Neel, and riotous mise-en-scènes of people, objects, and cultural references. These latter works, which he affectionately calls his “kitchen sink drawings,” pull from what surrounds him in his daily life and “are somewhat of a reflection of my personality in the way that I converse with friends—I talk about everything.” Regarding his process and technique, he explains: “The way I study form is very much topographical, and I use hatch marks like little ants covering the surface. Mood and energy can be manifested by a delicate touch or a rougher, cruder hatch line.” In this way, the subject becomes wholly inseparable from its artistic handling, collapsing essence and execution into one.
(Born 1984; lives and works, San Francisco)
As the works of these seven artists demonstrate, the medium of drawing offers abundant opportunities for creation that extend beyond its traditional association with preparatory sketches and studies. It is a realm of artistic invention unto itself, one with no less power to awe and awaken, provoke and inspire.