The Alexia Goethe Gallery presents three distinct worlds of drawings through the works of Lia Anna Hennig, Felicity Powell and Virginia Verran. In this show, drawing is not a preparatory study for something more, but rather a very intricate final piece, which still retains the whimsical and candid qualities that frequently present drawing as subservient to more ‘finished’ mediums.
The three artists appropriate the medium variously. Lia Anna Hennig’s world of drawing is a vast and intricate network of marks which accumulate to produce astonishingly dynamic spaces, with constantly surprising images, figures populating the larger amalgamations.
Beehive – Felicity Powell
In contrast, Felicity Powell’s wax work drawings are tiny in proportion, but are similarly intricate. Pseudo-mythological, the technique is appropriated from a kind of medal making. That Powell made medals from these pieces seems to scupper the notion that drawing can be drawing in its own right, as is so evident in the other two artists’ works. Although the pieces stand autonomously, that they are a bi-product of the medals almost undermines their place here. That said, Powell’s otherworldly drawings, which borrow from mythology and nature, result in a marriage of form and meaning that is at once surprising and unsettling.
Virginia Verran – Bolus Space
Where Felicity Powell borrowed her technique deliberately from seventeenth century medal making, Virginia Verran’s arrival at her pieces was infinitely more chance. Having found a series of pre-cut circular MDF boards, Verran set about completing a series of works inspired by her residency in Ireland. Verran won the Jerwood Prize with these pieces, and asked to describe them she said they were ‘Intuitions · layers · planes · demarcations · nations · symbols · threats · bombardments · pointings · ponds · settlements · migrations · repetitions’. Most immediately distinctive in the works are the tracts of open space, reminiscent of a landscape. The works achieve something which painting rarely affords, an absence of material, allowing the spaces between to become as integral a part of the work as the marks made.
Rachel Bennett
Until 24 June www.alexiagoethegallery.com
