Drawing Sculpture

The show Drawing Sculpture is presenting a selection from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection’s wide-ranging holdings of works on paper for the first time, complemented by sculpture, videos and picture objects. About 60 works by 27 artists are being shown, dating from about 1960 to the present day. In each case the presentation will stage dialogues between classical Minimalist positions from the 1960s and international contemporary art.

The concept of dialogue between works from different periods and styles will be drawn into focus once more, and taken outside the exhibition gallery by a special exhibition called Auke, Giorgio, Ignaz and Oskar. The Dutch sculptor Auke de Vries has chosen works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Bodemuseum as well as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. These will strike up a conversation, as originals or large-format photographs, with de Vries’s sculptures, which are both abstract and richly allusive in their motifs.

The show is not addressing drawing as a tool for sketches and preliminary stages leading to actual works of art, but presenting it above all as an independent and potentially creative medium.
Drawing’s conceptual possibilities resulted from developments in the course of the 20th century, especially in connection with the move away from figurative to abstract art. Here the changed perception of the work of art not as a completed unit but that of art as a process has an important part to play.

One further aspect addressed by the exhibition shows drawing’s potential for working in three-dimensions. Again and again it is sculptors who exploit drawing’s ability to explore an exciting relationship between line, surface and three-dimensional presence, and who have paid attention to the creative function of line in outline and internal structure, in other words to disegno. Drawing in the present perception of art, in an extended sense, also includes work that has been produced not by classical drawing but as a working process, and that suggests the essential character of drawing as the origin of order and structure, and its quality as a sensual and tactile expressive form.