Drawings

19 – 29 November 2008
Opening of the exhibition and launch of 'Zombie' on Wednesday 19 November at 18:00.

The focus of this exhibition is on Mark Kannemeyer’s black & white pen and ink drawings. Zombie is a new strip magazine conceptualized and edited by Mark Kannemeyer (Lorcan White).

Mark Kannemeyer's pen and ink landscape drawings occupy a creative space between gesture and concept. These drawings, subtly and ironically referencing the work of such diverse artists as Van Gogh, Cezanne and El Greco, render landscapes in gestural, impressionist marks by applying black ink in broad dashes and generous waves and swirls on the paper. In each drawing the landscape seems to swell out and culminate in an organic outcrop, similar in shape to Cezanne’s ubiquitous, cubist Mount Sainte-Victoire, and El Greco’s undulating Toledo hills. But the true genius of Kannemeyer's drawings resides in the Van Gogh-like dashes, waves and swirls that seem to form

erotic, vulva-like shapes dispersed throughout his landscapes. Put side by side, these drawings form a type of landscape template, or map, each being modified and extended in the preceding one, evolving into a kind of rhizomatic survey of Kannemeyer’s ‘thinking in and through drawing’. His drawing is a generative space of thought in which concepts are positioned in conflict and coercion to one another. Nature and natural forces are posited in opposition to hand-built and machine-made elements and environments such as boxes and box-like cityscapes. The creative clash between these is what makes Kannemeyer’s landscapes truly iconoclastic in contemporary drawing.