About exhibition
The exhibition “unSEEN: The Unpredictable Forms of Drawing” brings together sketches and drawings of fifty artists from around the world in an exhibition that provides a rare, revealing look into the drawing process and artists’ innermost thoughts. The exhibition seeks to unearth a raw form of creative energy channeling the essential truth of an artist not pasteurized for public consumption. Unlike artwork created for public or commercial use, the diverse array of works included in “unSEEN” will reveal an authenticity that exists in intimate spaces hidden from the public eye such as an artist’s sketchbook or studio.
By focusing on the medium of drawing, the purpose of this exhibition is to showcase not the finished, polished products of traditional art exhibitions but rather the authentic, unfiltered beginning of something recorded through drawing.
The exhibition “unSEEN” is a part of an international project “Draw” that began its travels in 2012, visiting art institutions around the world.
The concept of the “Draw” project began with the discovery of several sketchbooks that no one knew existed excavated from the New York studio of the late LeRoy Neiman after the artist’s passing. The stark difference between the drawings covering the pages of a sketchbook from 1949–52 compared to the characteristically jocular and proud imagery of Neiman’s “Americana” is shocking, if not jarring. Neiman himself has publicly asserted that he does not attempt to delve much beyond the surface in his work. In these sketchbooks, however, gone are the prismatic and impressionistic illustrations of famous people and places. Instead, we find the murky depths of the realm of demons, mutated monsters and mythical beasts to reveal a completely diverging, hidden side of the famed artist. This discovery begs the question: how many more of these kinds of artist sketchbooks are out there? And, where does the artist go in the absence of outside pressures, expectations and interpretation?
To begin to answer this question about the artists’ internal dialogue, artists including Jasper Johns, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith, and many others will have their drawings displayed unconventionally as one might find them in a private studio.
In addition to works by artists from the collection of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Printmaking at Columbia University in New York, the exhibition also showcases the local art scene as selected by the DOTS GALLERY curatorial team. These are artists of the younger generation Jelena Bulajić, Bogoljub Đoković, Nina Ivanović, Nemanja Nikolić, Nikola Radosavljević, Teodora Rakidžić, Jelena Sredanović, Ivan Šuković and Ivan Šuletić, who explore the field of drawing through their creativity.
In connecting the private sketches and drawings of artists, this exhibition calls into question concepts of public versus private, individual versus group, and local versus global. The purpose of this exhibition ultimately, is to celebrate the very dualities inherent to this medium.
The exhibition “unSEEN: The Unpredictable Forms of Drawing” is a result of the collaboration between LeRoy Neiman Print Center at Columbia University in New York and The DOTS GALLERY in Belgrade.
