‘Pushing Paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now’ at Cooper Gallery, Barnsley

Missives from ‘a temple of paper’… A review of ‘Pushing Paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now’, an exhibition co-curated by the British Museum with partner museums from around the UK to tour contemporary artworks from its Prints and Drawings collection. The exhibition runs at the Cooper Gallery, Barnsley until 5 February 2022, then shows at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, 2 April – 4 June 2022.

Jo Manby

‘Pushing Paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now’ is organised by a curatorial team headed by Hugh Chapman, Keeper of the Prints and Drawings Study Room at the British Museum. Where on earth do you start in making a selection for a survey show like this, when, as Chapman points out in an introductory video for the touring exhibition, ‘there are over a million works on paper’ in the Study Room, itself ‘a temple of paper’?

Collaborating with staff from the tour venues, 56 works were selected for the exhibition. Setting out to visit it at the Cooper Gallery in Barnsley, I wondered about the number of permutations that could have been made. Reading through the online information and watching the artist interview videos (courtesy of the Glynn Vivian, a previous tour venue), I hung back from looking at the virtual tour until I’d seen the real thing, as the prospect of the stellar cast of ‘Pushing Paper’ sounded so inspiring. David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Bridget Riley, Hew Locke, Phyllida Barlow, Judy Chicago, to name a few.

The introductory section at the Cooper Gallery begins with a strange, desolate work which could have been made in the earliest decade of the show. Andrzej Jackowski’s Voyage 5 (2010) forms part of a suite of 60 drawings he produced between 2011 and 2012 to exhibit at Brighton Museum. Using charcoal, linseed oil and varnish with watercolour, Jackowski repeated this type of empty theatre-like space, or ‘dreamspace’ which he could then fill with different figures, stories and relationships. Here, a father and son stand together in a room with an abandoned Christmas tree propped up against a table and an empty suitcase. Thoughts of a cancelled vacation or a sending away arise. The fact that Jackowski himself was the son of refugees and that he remembers the people in the refugee camp in North Wales thinking that they were going to go back to Poland heightens the poignancy of the drawing.

Gerhard Richter’s Ohne Titel (Untitled) (1976), which hangs nearby, is conversely a strikingly contemporary delineation of a three-dimensional space. It seems to anticipate the interlocking vectors of virtual structures so easily conjured by computer algorithms today. Its delicate grids of fine lines are punctuated by floating coloured marks in felt tip pen. Just round the corner is the earliest work, the 1970 collaged drawing Hanging Gardens of Rock City by Liliane Lijn, in which the artist has embellished photography and magazine cut-outs with green crayon.

There appear to be four distinct sections here, indicated with signage as Systems and Process; Power and Protest; Time and Memory; and Identity. The curators refer to an overarching theme of process, however. There is also the introductory section, which seems to include various forms of mapping and building. Coming under this latter definition are Tacita Dean’s Wandermüde (2007), Edward Allington’s Leicester (2005), and David Nash’s Wooden Boulder (1981).

For Wandermüde, Dean incises carbon paper mounted on paper with black ink. Echoing its obverse, Wanderlust, or the desire to wander, the title here translates as ‘tired of wandering’. The work was first exhibited at Frith Street Gallery, London in 2007 alongside a film by Dean in response to the German writer WG Sebald and his book The Rings of Saturn. Wandermüde could be interpreted as the last few thoughts of someone lost in a dark landscape, or having lost the ability to communicate, their language reduced to these spidery, fragmented, scratched marks.

To the left of Dean’s mysterious, obliterated map-like work hangs the dreamlike ink drawing, Leicester, by Edward Allington. The artist depicts a three-dimensional space in which some kind of surreal alchemical experiment may be going on. A thin ground of white emulsion has been painted over a page from an old accounting ledger, with copperplate inscriptions and grids of red ink still visible. It’s as if the accountant who wrote in the ledger has also left behind the traces of an idea. Perhaps he dreamed up a new process that required these strange vessels, and that could make his name as an inventor, take him away from his day-job. This is archetypical of the power of drawing to communicate ideas. The ‘Pushing Paper’ curators have made an excellent job of selecting works that shortcut to what was going on in the artist’s head as they created the drawing.

On the other side of Wandermüde is Nash’s Wooden Boulder, a 2-dimensional example of land art. Nash carved a boulder from a fallen oak tree and pushed it into a stream in North Wales from where he left it to join the Dwyryd Estuary and eventually the Atlantic Ocean, across a period of 25 years. The drawing, an elaborate photo-document, explains the boulder’s path. Doubling back to a different section of the show, Systems and Process, Roger Ackling’s An Hour Walk Along Forest Paths (1978) is one of two 3-dimensional works in ‘Pushing Paper’, also counting as land art. It comprises a stick found by the artist on his walk which he then scorch-marked by focusing sunbeams onto it.

Within the exhibition’s selection, itself only one of multiple possible permutations, many different such pairings could be made. The sections could have been defined in a broad range of ways, such as by art movement; there are examples of pop art, op art and minimalism, as well as land art, among other genres. Adel Daoud’s Charbon de Chair (2014), which is hung in the Time and Memory section, is a delicate but fraught charcoal drawing of skeletons, parts of which have been erased or smeared away.

Charbon de Chair could easily appear next to Maggi Hambling’s My Mother Dead (1988) or Tracey Emin’s My Abortion – 1990 (2010), both in the Identity section. Not only because all three touch on the subject of mortality, but because the drawings themselves are evidence of the artists grappling with, fumbling around for, a way of expressing their emotional response to a profound experience. Emin’s blue monotype drawing seems to indicate the passage of the embryo’s soul away from the mother’s body, all the more touching when you read that the verso of the work has the same drawing, in reverse, in purple ink and fine-tip pen. The mounted and framed work has a kind of double life, a concealed secret at its heart.

However, the curatorial team of ‘Pushing Paper’ have planned in some excellent treats in terms of positioning complementary works side by side. Micah Lexier’s A Minute of My Time (1999) with Seb Patane’s Miss Hilda Moore (2007), for example, both in the Memory and Time section. The former presents a line drawing by Lexier which has been embroidered over with simple white cotton stitches by another (anonymous) person. The latter consists of a photographic portrait of an actress on a page from an Edwardian theatrical magazine, with a black biro intervention. One deals with the immediacy of minutes and seconds, the value of work, and the working day. The other bestows a newfound validity on a piece of printed paper from a bygone era.

Similarly, in Power and Protest, Stuart Brisley’s Dirty Protest, Armagh (1993-96) is the historically and politically specific counterpoint to AR Penck’s Ohne Titel (Untitled) (1992), which is pared back to reveal something universal about conflict in its elemental, sign-like delivery.

For the online resource on the Cooper Gallery’s website, there are several artist interviews that are well worth a look. Myra Stimson, whose work SW#1 Word Pile (2000) features in Systems and Process, reveals the sets of exacting rules she works by to minimise her own presence in her drawings. Stimson uses found paper, like the ledger in Allington’s Leicester referred to above. She outlines the shapes of words she discovered written on notebook jotting pages that once belonged to office workers. In some distant way she honours the working lives of these nameless people through her transformative process.

Concerns with the written word also seem to compel the artist Jacob El Hanani, who in Three Kav (1997) references the micrography of ancient Hebrew practice. Tiny letters are amassed together to create a decorative block of symbolic patterns. Similarly, Imran Qureshi’s Where the Shadows are So Deep (2016) uses tiny cursive marks in tinsel-like gold leaf on a gouache painted ground, quivering with motion and mysticism.

I was particularly fascinated by Rachel Duckhouse’s video interview, describing how she arrived at her methodology and mode of expression through drawing. She is represented here in the Systems and Process section by Corallinae (2011), one of a series in which she explores the nano-architecture of shells, including mother-of-pearl. Using forensic-level enquiry, she develops new perspectives on the natural world. In contrast to Sol LeWitt’s crisp, minimalist yellow ink square, Untitled (1971) and Anish Kapoor’s pure pigment Blue Square (1996), both of which might be said to be in pursuit of the last word on a matter, Duckhouse has a completely expansive, cumulative outlook. When you see the passion and commitment in her work you can’t imagine that she has a minute spare in her day to do anything else but draw.

What makes the ‘Pushing Paper’ selection such a good one is that while parallels and comparisons can be made, each drawing is specific to the artist’s stylistic and instinctive intentions and in that sense, each retains its own individuality and idiosyncrasy. ‘Pushing Paper’ is an inspiring exhibition that left me wanting to spend more time drawing; and wondering, again, about permutations. And, given the breadth and quality of the British Museum’s holdings, about when we will see the next iteration.