From Hand to Mind – Group Show

carlier | gebauer, Madrid, presents a group exhibition, opening Friday, 15 November from 1-3 pm. From Hand To Mind will include works by Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Luis Gordillo, Julie Mehretu, Edi Rama, Jessica Rankin, Amy Sillman, Erik Schmidt, and Janaina Tschäpe. The exhibition marks the gallery’s first collaboration with the Spanish artist Luis Gordillo.

Drawing possesses a fleeting quality. At times tentative and provisional, it has the ability to make an idea or a mood tangible and visible—therefore traversing the boundaries between visible and invisible worlds. A liminal and unfixed space, drawings are always on the verge of becoming and disappearing, as art historian Michael Newman notes, “drawing, with each stroke, re-enacts desire and loss. Its peculiar mode of being lies between the withdrawal of the trace in the mark and the presence of the idea it prefigures.” From Hand To Mind explores the various ways that mark-making and line function as an intimate form of language, serving as a conduit to an artist’s consciousness. The drawings on view by Spanish artist Luis Gordillo demand and direct our attention. Using a bold visual language of thick lines, circles, and experiments with different textures they evince a keen interest in the interaction of conscious or unconscious elements of the mind. Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s vibrant, high-key abstractions possess an animated, notational quality fueled by a highly personal and idiosyncratic lexicon of gestures. In Janus Suite IV, a work from a collaborative series of drawings made by artists Jessica Rankin and Julie Mehretu, Rankin creates a series of celestial and textual ruptures among Mehretu’s fluid, dynamic mark-making. Created in an environment of state power, Edi Rama’s brightly colored marker drawings function as a form of psychic release and can be read as an abstract diary of sorts—a dynamic record of political life. These markings form an alternative system of communication, capturing a kind of excess or charge of the everyday life of an artistpolitician. Riffing on the power dynamics of seated dinners in the art world, Amy Sillman’s Seating Chart offers scathingly honest off-the-cuff remarks about her dining partners with stream of conscious descriptions of their personalities or professional affiliations. Thick globs of brightly colored paint rhythmically punctuate Erik Schmidt’s aerial views of discount travel groups in anonymous cityscapes, revealing an insouciant attitude towards the boundaries between painting, photography, and drawing. The interplay between vivacious scrawls and languid drips in Janaina Tschäpe’s Desert convey the plasticity of subjectivity and an artist in thrall to the mysteries of the natural world, which she activates as a site of morphological transformation.

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