Exhibition Opening: The Projective Drawing

THE PROJECTIVE DRAWING
FEBRUARY 6 – MAY 13, 2018
Austrian Cultural Forum New York
11 East 52nd Street, New York

Artists on view:
William Cordova, Lionel Favre, Sara Flores and the Shipibo Conibo Center, New York, Simona Koch, Brigitte Mahlknecht, Judith Saupper, Seher Shah, James Siena, Katrín Sigurdardóttir, and Leopold Strobl.

6 – 7 PM Artist Talk featuring curator Brett Littman (Drawing Center, New York) and Elsy Lahner (Albertina, Vienna) in conversation with Austrian artists, Judith Saupper, Brigitte Mahlknecht and Lionel Favre
7 – 8 PM Reception

Free with RSVP https://www.acfny.org/event/the-projective-drawing/

Join us for the opening of The Projective Drawing, a group exhibition curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director, The Drawing Center, New York. In the framework of the opening, curator Brett Littman and Elsy Lahner (Albertina, Vienna) will be in conversation with Austrian artists Judith Saupper, Brigitte Mahlknecht and Lionel Favre. The talk in the ACFNY auditorium is followed by a reception.

The exhibition is based on The Projective Cast, a book published in 1995 by architectural historian Robin Evans that defines a new way to explain how we “see” architecture by incorporating all sensations that underpin the human experience of built structures (mental, physical, and emotional). In The Projective Drawing, curator Brett Littman applies Evans’s theory, which is skeptical of drawing at its core, to challenge and expand our understanding of how the medium of drawing operates in contemporary culture. Within the striking architecture of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, designed by Raimund Abraham in 1992, the exhibition includes both Austrian and international artists who require viewers to activate a matrix of complex and nontraditional ideas in order to interpret the works on view.

::PANELISTS

Since 2007, Brett Littman has been the Executive Director ofThe Drawing Center, based in SoHo, New York. His interests are multi-disciplinary and he has overseen more than seventy-five exhibitions over the last decade dealing with visual art, craft, design, architecture, music, science, and literature. Littman is also an art critic and lecturer, an active essayist for museum and gallery catalogs and has written articles for a wide range of UnitedStates-based and international art, fashion, and design magazines.

Since 2011, Elsy Lahner is the curator for contemporary art at the Albertina in Vienna, a museum known for holding one of the most important collections of graphic art in the world. Some of her key exhibitions at Albertina are: Gottfried Helnwein (2013), Dreaming of Russia (2013), Eric Fischl. Friends, Lovers, and other constellations (2014), and a comprehensive exhibition on international contemporary drawing, Drawing Now: 2015′ (2015). In 2007 she co-founded the exhibition off-space “weisses haus”, which frequently collaborates with the ACFNY.

Lionel Favre was born 1980 in Morges, Switzerland. In 2010 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, class of Daniel Richter. He has been working on technical drawings and plans for the past 10 years. With his work in this exhibition he is trying to discover the influences and traditions that are silently hidden around us and show what holds our world together. Lionel lives and works in Vienna, Lausanne und Geneva.

Brigitte Mahlknecht was born 1966 in Bolzano and now lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Starting in the 1980ies with her first group exhibition, she carried on working as an artist, creating and developing her own style. It is singular as she works with different techniques on paper but also develops paintings on canvas mostly using the line on paper as a starting point. For years, Brigitte Mahlknecht has been interested in non-Euclidean geometry that is higher-dimensional ideas and their descriptions. She has exhibited internationally in group and solo shows.

Judith Saupper was born 1975 in Feldkirch, Austria. She graduated in Stage and Film Design from the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2004. She participated in more than 40 group exhibitions and more than 10 solo exhibitions. She earned several honors, such as the Frame Award for contemporary art in 2010 and the government funded scholarship for fine arts in 2014. Judith lives and works in Vienna and Lower Austria.