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2003
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper
170 drawings, 32 x 24 cm each
Buro Empty, Amsterdam, NL
Buro Empty’s rooms are located on the second floor of an old Amsterdam townhouse. Rather than being neutralized gallery rooms, they are recognizable as a former residence, with two open fireplaces, unvarnished wood floors, baseboards, profile doorframes, and a plinth-like shelf along one wall still extant. The non-neutrality was used to integrate the drawings even more forcefully than before into an installational context. The drawings are mounted in five rows, rising from the floor and concluding at eye level, or 5.6 feet. For the installation in Amsterdam, the block of drawings formed in this way was explicitly integrated into the situation of the rooms: all walls (including the baseboards) were painted dark brown up to a height of 5.75 feet. The surface on which the drawings were mounted, taking up two walls each in two rooms, was thus mediated to the architectonic structure with its reminiscences of residential comfort. More strongly than in invasion, the drawings are integrated, as the panels of a sort of wall treatment, into a decorative ensemble. The situation of the exhibition of drawings is overdetermined by the residential scenery.
For each room, one additional color was chosen to complement the black-and-white of the drawings: blue and orange. One main motif dominated in each block of drawings: furniture, faces, ladders, and historic paintings. Between them appeared repetitive abstract patterns (circles, spray-painted diagonal crosses) and various figurative motifs. A publication on the occasion of the exhibition presented reproductions of the drawings without any accompanying writing, as a pure picture book.