Drawing in the Age of Uncertainty

During the late 90s and the turn of century we could witness in contemporary art praxis the explosion of scenical spectacularity, excessive materialfetishism and an aggressive monumentalism based on seemingly unresistable effects of a mixture of surprising inventions of virtual realities, socio-cultural simulacrum and playful hedonism.
From the mid tens of the new century a tendency toward introverted, personal, empathic, psychologically complex narratives and anthropological orientation embody themselves in the work of several artists of the young and middle generations. This new intimacy reveals hidden realities, irrational imaginaries, irritating improbabilities. The newly valuated drawing seems to be the par excellence medium of the narratives of uncertainties and obscurities. It’s not accidental that so many young artists turn toward the drawing in our days.

Through the spontaneous, improvisative, “ecriture”-character of drawing, dreams and phantasies will be transmitted in an immediate, sensitive way, which seems to be freed from any hierarchical formsystem. Contemporary drawing has an obsessively accumulative character, it can absorb fairly different formal systems, styles, semantic structures and narratives without loosing the inner coherency. Contemporary drawing artists frequently operate with historical, mythological, ethnographical references and create complex, multilayered visual systems.

The fascinating richness and diversity of drawing by the artists selected for this book manifest not only the more and more important role of drawing in contemporary artistic praxis but also a new thematical orientation towards inwardness, intimacy and intriguing uncertainty, which might be a possible answer on the experience of fragility, vulnerability and fundamental desorientation of our age. The ephemeral character, the sensuality and the psychological complexity of contemporary drawing evoke an empathic approach on reality while the multilayered referencial structures embody the intention of revealing connections between different human experiences.