Louise Despont, Jutta Koether, Alicja Kwade, Anj Smith, Marianne Vitale, Unica Zürn
Ibid Projects , London, UK
Unica Zürn, Untitled (1963)
Magnus Edensvard, the co-director of Ibid Projects and curator of their current group show, has long taken an interest in the work of Unica Zürn (1916–70). Zürn is known for her automatic drawing, her partnership with Hans Bellmer and, most dramatically, for jumping to her death from his apartment. Visiting one of the gallery’s artists, Marianne Vitale, at her New York studio, Edensvard was struck by how the drawings discarded on the floor and paw-marked by cats resembled Zürn’s. Vitale, a straight-talker, had never heard of Zürn, but they decided to put together a show considering unidentified legacy and complimentary practice among several artists working independently of one another.
Unica Zürn, Untitled (1953)
Six of Zürn’s drawings from the 1950s and ’60s are displayed among five other female artists of different ages: Louise Despont, Jutta Koether, Alicja Kwade, Anj Smith and Marianne Vitale. While Zürn is the ostensible platform you discover that her work effects a series of relationships within the rest of the group. However, viewing Zürn and Vitale side-by-side is to witness the collapse of time and identity. Created 30 years later Vitale’s indeterminate but purposeful and intensely inked marks present a startling continuity to Zürn’s doodles and in particular those salvaged by Hans Bellmer. One such is an intricate map like drawing torn into three parts and reassembled by Bellmer. The perforated lines of these pieced-together fragments are a touching legacy of the artists’ troubled relationship and Zürn’s periodic internments in various mental hospitals.
Marianne Vitale, Horse Fed (2005)
The theme of time recurs in the meticulous line drawings of Louise Despont, who works on ledger paper used by the British in India. Found in an antiques shop in Delhi, the origins of 12 uniform accounting pages on which Couple with Clock Tower is drawn are more surprising. Intriguing handwritten records of ‘cattle assessment’ and ‘yak meat’ are barely discernible behind the geometric shapes that delineate man, woman and clock. Despont’s materials, in this instance from Yakima Valley, Washington, subtly contextualise the idea of time and the formal possibilities for creative expression in graphic drawing.
Jutta Koether, ‘Mad Garlands’ (detail, 2011)
Nearby Jutta Koether’s figures, hands and faces look like the hasty sketches of unconscious doodling. Childish red felt-tip is a further reminder of Zürn’s freewheeling automatism. But Koether’s agenda is concerned with seeing or illusion. Exhibited in Perspex photo-display boxes placed on eye-level supports, each sheet of paper has drawings on both sides of it. From whichever side you look you see the immediate markings as well as the faint back-to-front outline of the reverse image. The effect is disorientating even irritating as your eyes search to gain perspective. You sense the curator’s desire to register the potential of line.
Anj Smith, The Dead of Night (2011)
Anj Smith’s weird punky worlds punctuate the show’s implicit association with Surrealism. She has crafted a glimpse of two intriguing landscapes where the material of paint is part of the subject. Thick impasto leaf forms spill out over the edge of glistening canvases in which arbitrary emblems of consumer culture – a Nike trainer, a deflated happy face balloon – sit amongst organic matter: flora and fauna, tiny perfect skulls with 3D teeth and fossils from the depths of the sea. Smith grants authenticity to each lovingly crafted world by balancing sculptural modelling with lines scraped carefully into smooth surface areas.
Marianne Vitale, Patron (2009)
There is no centrepiece to this show and, rather than propose an overarching theme, Edensvard has simply listed the artists names – a quiet lesson in how to juxtapose different artists so their work assumes both strong individual and collective identities. Vitale is the last trick up his sleeve: her video Patron (2009), a hit at the last Whitney Biennial, provides a sonic counterbalance to the intensity of line studies. Shouting at you viciously Vitale delivers a non-stop diatribe against patrons. Humorous venom, it feels personal: ‘Two patrons think that everyone owes them the Holy Roman Empire!’ Indeed. A gentler Vitale offers a more fitting summation of the show. Asked in an interview if her working process was automatic she replied ‘There is, I suppose, an automatism… in letting the work define itself. The drawing instructs me. It dictates its content’. An obvious parallel perhaps but this small group exhibition encourages such a process in its audience and achieves it exceptionally well.
Kate Marris
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