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Some notes on the ACRE series of pencil drawing
28 drawings made during a residency in Acre, Brazil as part of my invitation to the 27th Sao Paolo Bienal, ‘How to live together’. Drawing as reportage: I have tried to merge historical, environmental, anthropological research with my own experience of rituals, exchanges, and travel during my residency in Acre. This series does not capture […]
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Heinrich Ehmsen: artistic witness of the Munich Revolutionary Days
I began my preoccupation with Heinrich Ehmsen at the end of the 1970s when I was studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. In a study group concerned with exploring the image production during the Munich soviet republic, I took over the research on the topic of reportage drawing. It quickly became clear […]
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Laptop in Chinese
Matthias Reinhold attended a six-month course dealing with traditional Chinese painting at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, in southeast China. He presents a report for the MePri on the teachings conveyed at the art academy in the field of tension between classical landscape painting and the present-day reality of life, and on the […]
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The Privatized Subcontinent. On John Corbet Anderson and C.R. Francis:”Sketches Of Native Life In India” (1848)
Among the innumerable illustrated travelogues about India directed to a primarily British audience in the18th and 19th centuries, „Sketches of Native Life in India,“ a book that was published in London in 1848,has gained a special reputation for its exceptional visual impressiveness and its idiosyncratic qualities.Today, even single illustrated sheets from this work are almost […]
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“Air Line” or The Unchosen Motif
The Dutch word “onverkoren” is a fictive, ambiguous term. It can mean both “not selected” and “not chosen.” Motifs not selected are motifs I came upon by chance. I am a painter who works outdoors, “in front of the motif.” My search for motifs in nature or in the city is influenced by the usual […]
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“You Draw What You Know” – In conversation with Theo de Feyter
A conversation on archaeology and drawing MePri, Düsseldorf, 12/16/2006 Alexander Roob: In addition to your art studies, you also completed a period of studies in archaeology and then worked as a professional archaeologist. Perhaps you can start with a bit of biographical information. Theo de Feyter: I first studied art at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, […]
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Menzel’s lurking about!
The more clearly and distinctly, more realistically things find themselves depicted, the more com-plex the play of perceptions and questions becomes. It is precisely the simple, the banality of the everyday become image that on closer inspection begins to drift off into the drama of the Symbolic or to founder in pure doubling … > […]
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Menzel and Chodowiecki – “Unreigned” drawing
When he found himself obliged to the “Verein Berliner Künstler” due to a generosity bestowed upon him, Menzel decided to gladden his colleagues with a representative gift that was meant to recommend to them his own artistic program as a path to take. He painted the posthumous, life-sized portrait of the Berlin artist and miniaturist […]
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From Berlin to Danzig [Excerpts from: Daniel Chodowiecki’s Drawn Account of a Journey from Berlin to Gdansk in 1773]
Sorry, not translated yet. Der Abschied. Nach monatelangen Reisevorbereitungen verabschiedet sich der Künstler am Morgen des 3. Juni 1773 von seiner Familie im Hof seines Berliner Hauses in der Brüderstrasse. Der Aufenthalt in Pyritz. Am Morgen des zweiten Tags erreicht er Pyritz, wo das kränkelnde Pferd anfängt zu lahmen. Während es von einem Schmied beschlagen […]
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Robert Weaver – The other Pittsburgher
In his “Songs for Drella”, Lou Reed claimed that no Michelangelo could ever come from the hicktown of Pittsburgh. But this does not stand up to close examination. Robert Weaver is from Pittsburgh and in 1949, the same year the other Pittsburgher Andy Warhol, the subject of Reed’s cycle of songs, moved to the metropolis […]