Drawing is the foundation of art and, seemingly, fundamental to human consciousness — drawings are the oldest recorded form of human expression and the precursor to written language. In traditional art schools, students practice drawing for a year before picking up a paintbrush. Many artists who work broadly in other mediums continue drawing as a core of their practice. They do so because there is something primal about the act of drawing, about the translation of thought into gesture and gesture into line. The artist Cy Twombly wrote that, in drawing, “Each line is inhabited by its own history, it does not explain, it is the event of its own materialization.”
The Berlin-based artist Monika Grzymala — whose site-specific installation is on display in the Brooks Museum Rotunda through the end of 2022 — trained as a stone sculptor but always maintained a daily practice of drawing. One day, while she was drawing in her sketchbook, she felt the need to expand her drawing past the limits of the page and decided to use tape to extend the drawing across other surfaces in her studio. When she finished, she found she’d made something new: a sculptural drawing. She’d arrived at an artistic question that has preoccupied her ever since, the question of how to extend the act of drawing into three-dimensional space. Today, her sculptural drawings have been shown throughout the world, but this summer is the first time her work has been shown in the American South.
To craft her artwork at the Brooks, she used four different varieties of tape that she has specially manufactured in Germany. The tape varies in width and adhesiveness, allowing the artist to achieve a variety of lines as well as shapes. According to Brooks Museum curator Rosamund Garrett, who first encountered Grzymala’s work while a young student in England, Grzymala “thinks like an engineer” and is always paying attention to the weight and balance of her installations. Her work in the museum stretches the length of the Rotunda, attached to column and ceiling. The artist used miles of the tape, arranging it in long lines and clustered loops or layering it to craft structured supports. The black-and-white color of the piece recalls simple line drawings. A thin and nearly invisible fishing net provides a ceiling for the installation, but otherwise the work is completely made of tape, a tangle of expanding and contracting lines that appear differently depending on vantage point.
In looking at a traditional, two-dimensional drawing, a viewer experiences immersion by letting their eye follow the shape of the line. Grzymala’s work offers a version of that same experience, but rather than following a line visually, viewers can experience her work physically. She considers each installation to be a performance and the installation to be a temporary artifact of that performance. Likewise, viewing her work, you remain aware of time and space — not its illusion, but its frustrating reality. Standing beneath Grzymala’s artwork, it feels monumental, while viewing it from the museum’s second floor immerses the viewer in a complicated network of shapes. Things appear for a moment and then disappear depending on how you move through the piece. Shadows come and go as the light and hour changes.
Perhaps the installation is immemorable because it changes so much depending on how and when you experience it. Or perhaps it is more memorable because any aspect of the work becomes almost immediately reduced to memory. Even the tape, over the course of the year, will sag, changing the feeling of the installation with time. The primal gesture that began the drawing will continue until, still mysterious, it disappears from view.
The site-specific exhibition Rotunda Projects: Monika Grzymala is on view at the Brooks Museum through January 9, 2023.
