The fantastic medium of drawing has always had a steady home in DRAWING NOW Art Fair. An annual event in Paris, it has been an unmissable appointment for all art aficionados since 2007. Thanks to renowned galleries and artists from gathering at Le Carreau du Temple, drawings have gotten the recognition they deserve, and have been gracing private and public collections alike around the world.
For the 13th edition, DRAWING NOW Paris is going big. With 71 participants from 15 countries, who are bringing some 300 young and established artists who draw, the fair will provide a mesmerizing panorama of the medium’s history of the past 50 years. Alongside the rich Talks program, the visitors can expect 5 days filled with different activities, this year also including actual performances of drawings, as well as The Drawing Month, which will take place again in 2019 with art institutions dedicating even more exhibitions to drawing. Selected galleries will also show exclusive works straight from their storage, as part of the MASTER NOW section.
Find more out about the latest contemporary art fairs together with their protagonist on the new magazine area MeetMe!
Extending our talk on DRAWING NOW Paris 2019 is Joana P.R. Neves, the fair’s Artistic Director.
I MeetMee --> DRAWING NOW PARIS's Joana P.R. Neves
What can the visitors expect from the performative part of Drawing Now Paris 2019? Who are the invited artists?
This year, we decided to honour the tendency of drawing to associate itself with action. Tracing a line is a reflexive thing: it both represents something but it is also the path you took in time and in space. Artists are not only conscious of that but they also now use it as a tool for investigating the body, or social and political issues. The material of drawing is hyper-sensitive - paper or any form of surface - and, therefore, it is also perfect to record an action, by means, for instance, of a fold. The artists invited are immersed in the action of drawing: they are playing it, telling it or even singing it. Conversely, singing and thinking may very well be drawing. Or at least the diagrammatic quality of drawing is accurate when it comes to the vibration of sound or the schematic logic of thinking. Knowing this, artists use this mark-making capacity of drawing in many territories: performance almost in the athletic sense of the word, such as Mathieu Bonardet running to exhaustion while tracing on the wall or Nicole Wendel setting a dance rhythm with chalky rocks on a paper; there is the use of the line as a geopolitical tool in Stéphanie Rollin & David Brognon’s videos; Nikolaus Gansterer uses objects and projections of his interactions with diagrams, objects and words to explore the tenuous line between thinking and drawing; in this sense, story-telling is a recurring presence inasmuch as it incorporates the transformative power of live manipulation of drawing and drawing tools. In this sense drawing is taken in a very expanded sense at the confluence of movement and tracing. Action! We invited artists who are testing new boundaries of performance: we have ’now’ in the name and aim to bring novelty to our audiences and collectors. Ana Garcia Pineda is a young Catalan artist who is starting a very interesting career, Nikolaus Gansterer just came back from the Sharjah Biennial, Marianne Mispelaëre has been drawing a lot of attention in France between the world of edition, dance and visual arts for instance. It is an international program even with artists who are strongly associated with France like Jean-Christophe Norman whose work is present in several institutions such as MAC VAL and the Picasso Museum in Paris.
What prompted the decision to start Le Mois du dessin? How did last year’s debut help organize this year’s events?
Le Mois du Dessin comes from the strong commitment of the founder of the fair, Christine Phal, to turn the month of May into the month of drawing. Leading up to the fair there is an educational operation with schools, artists and galleries that will be invisible in the event itself (safe for a talk to discuss the outcome of the 2019 program). Naturally, institutions, museums and galleries program to some extent, drawing in their spaces and we also get to include then in our suggestions and VIP circuits. But this is a much more inclusive and external affair: to bring drawing to people who would perhaps not have access to it, not in terms or collecting but in terms of practice. Moreover, it is a way to introduce a contemporary idea of drawing into the education system so that we step away from observational and figurative drawing only - they are fine but they are not the only techniques one can explore in the multifaceted discipline of drawing, now. Christine is building it up on last year’s success and has managed to get more schools and art galleries involved.
MASTER NOW seems to be revealing some masterworks from prominent galleries. What are the criteria for the selection of these pieces?
Philippe Piguet, the previous artistic director, came up with this section which I like to think of as a treasure hunt. Of course, we are a contemporary drawing art fair therefore the notion of ‘masterpiece’ is related to recent history or to a rare item in an artist’s production. The selection is still Philippe’s: he chooses amongst the works galleries apply with. It is another way of suggesting a strong movement or an idiosyncratic rarity.
Cover images: View of Drawing Now Paris_©Emmanuel Nguyen Ngoc and Camille Bondon, La Mesure du Temps, 2018, un film parlé de Camille Bondon, durée 30 minutes, captures d'écran. Courtesy de l'artiste.