Chiaroscuro: A Century of Charcoal brings together works by over 30 artists made over the past 100 years. On view in a specially designed gallery on Vortic.art, with selected highlight works at Victoria Miro, London and Venice.
Charcoal is elemental. Born from fire, charcoal is made from wood (especially twigs of willow or vine) that has been heated to a high temperature in a low-oxygen environment (a process called pyrolysis). Its history as a medium is as old as human mark-making itself: the earliest artists, crouched in caves, dragged charred sticks across stone to summon animals and ancestors from the walls.
Artists have always prized charcoal for its ability to create soft, dark, velvety marks and subtle shading. Its crumbly nature makes it easily smudged but also easily erased. Drawing with charcoal also involves selectively removing it, creating highlights that allow the white paper to show through. This interplay between light and dark is one of the medium’s most distinctive features, known as chiaroscuro, an Italian word meaning literally ‘light-dark.’
The charcoal drawings presented in this exhibition date from the last 100 years and range from preparatory sketches to fully realised, monumental works. Among the earliest in date is Pierre Bonnard’s Femme dans un Interieur, that despite its ostensibly quotidian nature was likely drawn from memory. Bonnard drew everywhere, on every surface, especially on small pieces of paper such as this which would have fitted easily into the pocket. Working quickly, using a variety of charcoal marks, he captured not only the composition he wanted, but indicated how to break up the surface into areas of light and dark and even colour.
Further highlights include a previously unseen study by Paula Rego for her 1987 painting Snare, as well as figurative works by Chantal Joffe, Lucian Freud, R.B. Kitaj and Willem de Kooning. The exhibition also includes new works made especially for this exhibition by Sara Anstis, Ali Banisadr, María Berrío, Jake Grewal, Idris Khan, Konstantina Krikzoni, Shahzia Sikander, Olly Williamson, and Alexandre Zhu.
Emblematic of humanity’s first forays into creativity, charcoal is a medium that bridges past and present. The 43 drawings presented here encourage us to re-appreciate the medium, its diversity of uses, its versatility and its expressive power.
London: María Berrío, David Bomberg, Pierre Bonnard, Peppi Bottrop, Emily Miller Coan, Lucian Freud, Scott Hunt, Allan Kaprow, R.B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Celia Paul, and Jenny Saville. Venice: Sara Anstis, Ali Banisadr, María Berrío, Vivian Caccuri, Adrian Ghenie, Jake Grewal, Chantal Joffe, William Kentridge, Idris Khan, Konstantina Krikzoni, Celia Paul, Paula Rego, Shahzia Sikander, Barbara Walker, and Alexandre Zhu.
Vortic: Vivian Caccuri, Willem de Kooning, R.B. Kitaj, Konstantina Krikzoni, Whitfield Lovell, Arieh Lubin, Anna Park, Aurel Schmidt, Olly Williamson.
The exhibition is available to view on Vortic.art with selected highlight works at Victoria Miro, London and Venice.
