Monumental paper sculptures, endless lines and traces of something that was once the seabed. In Between Drawing, Kalmar konstmuseum shows three artists who all in different ways provide abstract and challenging approaches to what drawing can be.
The exhibition Between Drawing explores the basic principles of drawing. Marit Roland, Fatima Moallim and Helena Wikestam all work with drawing in an expanded sense. They stretch the meaning of the material paper, the basis of the art of drawing, and twist and turn the most central starting point for drawing – the line.
For Kalmar konstmuseum, Marit Roland makes the work Paper Drawing #37, in which she uses paper as a material to make a sculptural installation. She challenges the limits of paper and art’s illusions of spatiality, surface and depth. Each Paper Drawing project is based on the conditions of space and architecture, and each occasion becomes a unique process. For Marit Roland, drawing is an act that offers endless possibilities and perhaps one of the most accessible and democratic art forms.
Fatima Moallim depicts memories, observations, everyday situations and secrets with an exploratory and direct yet abstract expression. Her method is intuitive, she strives for the lines to never stand still and prefers to make the drawings in a single continuous movement. She does not go back to change or add, which is the very definition of drawing for Moallim. In Between Drawing she shows works that have not previously been shown in Sweden, such as Observation and Svart tiger from 2023.
Helena Wikestam’s work Det som en gång var havsbotten [What was once the seabed] is a creation that consists of 56 individual drawings made with self-made dry pastel crayons made of clay from a beach on the Baltic Sea. For Wikestam, drawing is both the past and the future, a way of thinking about geological time and working tangibly with the land, history and change.
The exhibition is curated by Sara Hemmingsson and is made in collaboration with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
Photo: Marit Roland, 2024