NOTES ON EXHIBITION
Similar to the iPad drawings of David Hockney, other artists found methods to overcome the constrains of the pandemic time and created works within the access and means available. But like a pencil and a piece of paper, the ‘medium´ itself does not tell the entire story. What is dissimilar to Hockney, and the reason why an artist like Sean Bluechel, who has done thousands of drawings using an iPad and experimenting with applications downloaded by his daughter, asking the question of how to deal with art through simple gestures, negating the notion of production by elevating the underlining rigour in the process.
There is a particular demand of the artist when the means of production are reduced. Think of Bruce Nauman’s The Contrepposto Studies, i through vii 2015/2016, the monumental work in his Disappearing Acts exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel in 2018, or the Erwin Wrum series of One Minute sculptures, or more recently, the Paul McCarthy’s personal instagram account. The latter not only shows how McCarthy studies online materials, it also reveals the conceptual underpinning in which McCarthy would eventually referred to in his Hammer Museum exhibition title in 2019, HEADSPACE.
These practices serve not only as an exercise for an artist’s mental dexterity, the gestures are the precise tools used to breach the boundaries of formulating, creating, between doing and undoing.
At the gallery, we present a series of drawings realised using 3-4 different iPad Applications and later printed on archival watercolour paper. These drawings made no attempt to follow the traditional systems of formatting, medium, printing nor framing. They are treated as free as the finger on the iPad screen which made them.
Joseph Tang