Artist Research
Arnulf Rainer with Dieter Roth & Günter Brus, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Louise Bourgeoise, Trisha Donnelly, Jaanika Peerna and Adrien Villa Lojas.The main focus, through the eyes of these artists, has been on science, micro-biological narratives and the physical/gestural nature of frenetic drawing actions. Many of the artists researched here represent a lineage of drawing throughout the early 20th century up to early 2000’s integrating ideas on the natural ecology and spatial art practices.
Bibliography
Dieter Roth & Arnulf Rainer – collaborations, editor Barry Rosen, texts by Bjørn Roth & Robert Flack, (London: Hauser & Wirth), 2014.
Drawings by Lesak and Rainer / Martin Friedman; Graham W.J. Beal, Lisa Lyons, (Mineapolis: Walker Aert Center), 1980.
Louise Bourgeoise, by Ulf Küster, (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz), 2011.
Louise Bourgeoise: The Insomnia Drawings by Louise Bourgeoise, Marie-Laure Bemadac, Elisabeth Bronfen, (Daros Collection) 2001.
Order, desire, light : contemporary drawing / [exhibition curator: Enrique Juncosa ; essays by Enrique Juncosa, Paolo Colombo and Catherine Lampert], (Dublin : Irish Museum of Modern Art) 2008.
Signs of Life, Editor Eduardo Kac, (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2007.
The Secret Theory of Drawing: David Austen, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson …, curated by Caoimhin Mac Giola Léith, (London: Drawing Room, Ireland: Model Arts & Niland Gallery), 2007.
Theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Berkley: University of California Press), 2012.
The Painting Factory: abstraction after Warhol, curator Jeffrey Deitch, editor Nikki Columbus, (New York: Skira Rozzoli, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art), 2012.
White Noise edited by Ernesto Edmonds & Mike Stubbs, (Melbourne: Australian Centre for the Moving Image), 2005.
[2018 research artists pdf]
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Developed in the context of ‘CONFLUENCE’ (2017/2018, Canberra, AUS), a project employing digital media to fabricate a series of inks on paper into material form.
The earlier Arnulf Rainer & Dieter Roth collabs dated 1973-1978 were at a stage in Rainer‘s career where he had emerged from early-career development of: “… a dialectic tension between the extremes of calm, meditative brush-strokes and vigorous physical expressivity. …. (a) series of gestural, body-related works deliberately executed at high speed … (revealing) a particularly eruptive energy” within the processes of his work.[fn1]
The Arnulf Rainer & Günter Brus collabs dated later in 1986 are prints in drypoint and etching over heliogravured botanical images. Produced were an edition of 50 plus additional sets of Artist proofs plus those designated not for sale. Arnulf Rainer’s drawings are usually made of dense bundles of lines intensely drawn on top of photographic images which invariably become obliterated beneath. Rainer has referred to his contribution to this work as: “‘energetic lines’ emphasising formal aspects in each composition … which Brus complemented with fantastical figures and verbal descriptions”.
Brus describes his work here as “motifs” that are “… ‘purely imaginative’ and derived ‘entirely from inner inspiration”. Placing these works adjacent to botanical prints inspires a reactionary and tangential response, maintaining an interactive yet independent dialogue with the science-based images.
Tate Gallery: “(Brus’ work is) a combination of poetic descriptions and images, often embryonic, protean forms surrounded by a halo of lines.” [fn2]
Santiago Ramon y Cajal was a neuroscientist and physicist (considered ‘the father of neuro-science’). Harboring a lifelong desire to be an Artist, his depiction of neuron activity in the brains of humans and animals are well-known. Of interests here are his collective compositions - the constellations in his work all based on actual brain activity - depicting communication between neurons.
Identified and documented by his detailed, exact hand-drawings at the turn of the previous century, Ramon y Cajal won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906.
Louise
Bouregoise who suffered from severe insomnia said that for her the state of
being asleep “is paradise.. but it is
conquerable. My drawings are a kind of rocking or stroking, and an attempt at
finding a kind of peace.” Bourgeoise uses her
drawings as a method of driving the sleeplessness away – “… like a form of lullaby.” 
Trisha Donnelly is a contemporary artist from the U.S., addresses her idea of drawing sound… as motif toward abstraction. Tate Gallery relates Donnelly’s account of her drawing; of waiting, listening, and exhaustively inscribing .. to the surrealist practice of automatism, in which the artist acts as: “a modest recording instrument”.
Jaanika Peerna brings an electric materialisation to her drawing practice in several ways. She is intimate with her medium being Mylar – a shiny plastic that one is able to use as paper but is more durable and reflective… through her work where she has investigated the broad colour spectrum of the colour grey, and the fascination of physics, particularly the movement of molecules and atoms.
Adrian Villa Rojas creates sculpture essentially, photographs them then uses the prints in his drawings over which he illustrates freehand. His themes are usually post-modern, post-apocalyptic fictitious visions of the future. His process takes us back to Arnulf Rainer’s more frenetic method of deconstructing photographs by scribbling across them, thereby creating a relationship between photographic - or scientific – imagery, and mind-mapping the imagination…
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