Having long since shed its status as a marginal or elementary practice, the medium of drawing has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent decades. No longer the domain of the merely preparatory, drawing’s position in the contemporary art landscape is a vital one, offering countless artists the means to describe their worlds, document their visions and detail the intangible.
Out of Line brings together recent works by more than thirty contemporary artists from across Canada working in drawing’s expanded field. Encompassing a broad array of styles and strategies—from representation and figuration to gestural abstraction and conceptual engagement—the works assembled here assess the impressively diverse and ambitious ways in which the drawing impulse is currently taking shape.
Moving from pencil, ink and watercolour to sculpture and collage, the works in Out of Line offer up an arresting depiction of the social, psychic and material realities of our current moment. With approaches both intimate and grand, traditional and novel, political and autobiographical, these works demonstrate drawing’s near limitless capacity to generate, transform and sustain new visual forms.
Installation shots by Toni Hafkenscheid.
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