Ringgold’s first solo exhibition in New England in nearly 15 years is centered around her story quilt “Picasso’s Studio”, a cornerstone of the museum’s collection.
Drawing the Vast and Invisible Dark Matter of Our Universe
The majority of our universe is energy and matter that we cannot see. The dark matter that overwhelms our earthly objects emits no light, and is therefore a nebulous thing to represent, something that is more an idea than a vision. French artist Abdelkader Benchamma is fascinated with these cosmic mysteries, and in an installation at the Drawing Center called Representation of Dark Matter, he sketched in tiny pen and India ink lines, shaded with charcoal, a huge drawing of what, to our eyes, is nothing.
“I really liked the challenge of giving form to something that’s so arcane and cannot be seen by the naked eye,” curator Joanna Kleinberg Romanow told Hyperallergic. “The result is a drawing that segues from representation, with imagery inspired by encyclopedia renderings of the Milky Way and the Big Bang, to pure fantasy: ideas and imagery conjured in Abdelkader’s imagination.”
Representation of Dark Matter is the first in a new series at the Drawing Center where artists are invited to fill the stairwell with site-specific installations. Benchamma’s drawing opened in April, and after 12 months will be painted over white to prepare for a new interpretation of the space.
Abdelkader Benchamma, “Representation of Dark Matter” (2015), installation view (all photos by Jose Andres Ramirez, courtesy The Drawing Center)
Romanow explained that as the Drawing Center’s first on-site wall drawing, there were a lot of unforeseen challenges when working in the narrow stairwell with a scaffold. “Abdelkader was incredibly resourceful in finding ways to gain access to all of the area’s surfaces, especially those inaccessible by the scaffold,” she said. “Aside from a lot of acrobatics, at one point he created a ‘drawing instrument’ comprised of a long measuring stick with a marker attached to it in order to reach those impervious surfaces. As a result, he was able to achieve a fully immersive constellation.”
Benchamma said in an interview with Studio 360 that “the spectator can really go inside to feel the drawing” and “it’s like a paradox between the precision of the drawing, everything is very precise, but at the end you can’t say what it is.” The completed work is a vortex of moving lines, the details emerging as you climb the stairs, representing in a way how all matter has this gravitational pull, even if we can’t see it. Benchamma often approaches huge ideas of astrophysics in his art, such as in his 2011 monograph Dark Matter published in conjunction with an exhibition at Galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris. In those monochromatic, densely drawn black lines, shown in the time-lapse video provided by the Drawing Center below, is an attempt to unravel and connect with this almost unfathomable power in our universe.
Abdelkader Benchamma, “Representation of Dark Matter” (2015), installation view
Abdelkader Benchamma, “Representation of Dark Matter” (2015), installation view
Abdelkader Benchamma, “Representation of Dark Matter” (2015), installation view
Abdelkader Benchamma: Representation of Dark Matter continues at the Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan) through March 1, 2016.
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Tagged: art and science , Articles , Drawing , Drawing Center , outer space
Allison Meier
Allison C. Meier is a former staff writer for Hyperallergic. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering visual culture and overlooked history for print and online media since 2006. She moonlights. More by Allison Meier
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Peter Pilotto Showcases Art by Max Lamb, Martino Gamper, and Others with Their New Collection
Designers Peter Pilotto and Christopher de Vos are exceedingly thoughtful when it comes to creating sets and selecting locations for their runway shows. In September the duo responsible for Peter Pilotto, the brand, invited guests to their East London studio, a beautiful space with a view of Regent’s Canal, to see their spring collection while sitting on colored stools made by their friend, the furniture designer Martino Gamper.
This time around, for the debut of their Autumn-Winter 2017 lineup on Sunday, Pilotto and De Vos amplified still further the role that close artist and designer friends play in their creative processes. Colorful, textured pieces by Gamper, Francis Upritchard, Max Lamb, and Bethan Wood were selected to accompany models and onlookers in a striking room—the Palm Court at the Waldorf Hotel, a vast, Edwardian, white space with milky skylighting and a sunken center floor. Such stark visual contrasts, Pilotto and De Vos say, are a cornerstone of their label’s aesthetic, as is sharing intimate aspects of their private world.
To better understand the vision behind their set design, AD spoke with the designers mere hours before their show.
The show set before guests arrive. Rugs by Max Lamb and Martino Gamper; wood screen and stools by Martino Gamper.
Architectural Digest: What role does other people’s art play in your brand?
Peter Pilotto: With this installation and collection, we want to celebrate that a little bit, because all of these artists are our closest friends here in London. And it is simply what surrounds and inspires us and the brand, and we find there is such an exciting synergy happening, where so many times we would be so motivated and inspired by the works and color palettes or contrasts of materials by all these different people. On the other hand, the girls in the group are wearing our pieces, look great in them, wear them with so much personality and in different ways, so again it’s constant inspiration both ways. Francis uses sometimes our fabrics for her sculptures, so we thought it’s important to show that to people.
Christopher de Vos: It’s putting it in a context—we live in London, we’re not from London, and moving here we’ve met and made friends with these amazing designers and artists. It’s really about those friendships, how we met them through what our passions are. It came really naturally, actually, having dinners at each other’s places and collecting each other’s pieces.
AD: How did you go about selecting the individual pieces by your friends to include?
PP: The set design is really using existing pieces from the different people involved in addition to some wall elements inspired by Francis Upritchard’s Frieze installation.
CdV: It’s a curation. We sat down with all of them and discussed what the idea was, and everybody thought it was exciting to do something with the natural cycles of the world of furniture and interior design. It was nice for them to put it into a different context, a fashion show, something they had never done.
PP: They’ve been to several of our shows, so it was interesting to hear their points of view on how to present the collection, or the speed of the show, all the different things.
Vase on partition by Francis Upritchard; rug on left by Martino Gamper; rug on right and stool by Max Lamb.
