Drawing Now - Drawing as a Sign of the Times
40 years after the legendary Drawing Now exhibition, organized in cooperation with the MoMA in New York, the Albertina shows another overview of the current significance of drawing and of relevant tendencies in the last ten years.
As Giorgio Vasari wrote in the foreword of his chief work “Le Vite....” , the drawing is the „father“ of painting, sculpture and architecture. In that sense, drawing would be an ancillary skill, subordinate to more noble endeavours, identifiable with the onset of an artistic activity that eventually unfolds at a higher level. Nowadays drawing is appreciated mainly in connection with the artist’s personality, either related to other works created with different techniques, or as an autonomous, intimate and direct means of expression. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this technique is the intimate, immediate connection between artist and the viewer. However, defining the term drawing has become somewhat difficult in this age and over time the limits of the classical definition have been expanded and even dissolved, in theory as well as in practice. Even the most original feature of drawing, its two-dimensionality, is being transcended in three-dimensional installations.
In our interview Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schröder reflects the changes of the medium drawing within the artistic developments of the last decades and states the necessity to reconsider the 19th century founding-identity of the museum Albertina as a grafic collection. (written by Cem Angeli)