JOSEPH BEUYS - A SPACE BETWEEN MIND AND HAND.
40 YEARS OF DRAWING - THADDAEUS ROPAC GALLERY LONDON.
Joseph Beuys - from a collection of 100 drawings on display at Thaddaeus Ropac London.
How beautiful is this space? - Somewhere between the minimal strict of the medical, a Kubrick corridor and something of a dance hall - all parquet or paved monochrome marble.
100 drawings by Joseph Beuys - the Grandfather of conceptual art and thinking - are shown for the first time in the UK. Presented in humble wooden frames on white washed-walls poured over in natural winter light - a collection from the Beuys family archive.
‘What is drawing? When two surfaces touch - a pencil line unwinds across the paper - it offers only itself - a line executed more by blindness - than evidence of something in the world… but this contact between mind and hand is evidence, shred, calculating evidence of a moment, when time and action unite - with minimum interference, minimal expectation, other than pencil on paper doing their most basic of tasks - to touch each other’ - writes Phyllida Barlow.
Barlows’ poetic introduction to this intimate exhibit feels respectfully on point, sensual even - private. My immediate thought was just that, these many fragments of errant thoughts, taken from a mass of notebooks feel Margiela-esque in their voyeuristic desirability - mysterious as the creative process is - the assorted mid-century stationary which creates an almost invisible background to the tender drawings to which they testify. The many pages - whose delicate edges are perforated with traces of the spines of journals from which they have been taken - books carefully pulled apart and reorganised to exhibit - a new order formed - a subtle reminder that these works were in fact from a series - whose original flow we will never know.
Notes made for the eye of the maker alone, graphite searchings, I imagine were never intended for public consumption - like any posthumous display of process - I wonder what would the artist think now? As an educator he probably would welcome the vulnerability of showing your ‘workings out’, the primary research stages of ideas - which were to evolve into more resolved outcomes later in his career. And there are little saplings of ideas here - sketches of hares, stags, insects, sledges, bodies, and the symbolism of birth, life, and death - all themes which the artist famously explored.
A wall displaying a series of drawings of mountains - feel particularly pivotal to the exhibitions course - these sketches are symbolic possibly of the artists mysterious past as a pilot, where he allegedly cashed into the mountainous regions of Znamianka in 1944. The artist was rescued by Tatar tribesmen who wrapped his body in animal fat and felt to aid the natural healing process - materials he revisited and used within his work as an artist. Interestingly these accounts have been questioned by historians and yet the hazy sense of reality seems important to the drawings - rendered with urgency - their line quality feels deliberate and searching, as if drawn from life - specific and yet also feathery vague - like memories or imaginings - the bleached white of paper - dazzling like sun on snow.
Joseph Beuys - 40 Years of Drawing - until 22 March 2023
Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street London