)( ) DRAWING AS THINKING IN ACTION

"Drawings are a theater of gestures, a way to materialize an idea between sight and hand." Newman Reviews

Taking this quote from the British artist Avis Newman as a starting point, the exhibition by Nikolaus Gansterer, an Austrian artist, highlights a broad conception of drawing that apprehends it as a process, that realizes and recognizes the both established and supposed potentials of this art form, as well as those that can still be revealed through experimentation and curiosity, and who imagines various forms by which the drawing can be made manifest, materialize and take shape.

In addition to drawing, Nikolaus Gansterer's artistic practice includes sculpture, cartooning, video, performance and artistic research. Considering the process of thought and that of drawing as analogous, he deals with a fundamental question: how to translate and visually represent mental processes, whether conscious or unconscious. Thus, he explores how drawing can become a communication tool, a score or an instruction for concrete actions. It is by seeking a playful way to deal with the complex levels of speculative knowledge that Gansterer has developed, since the early 2000s, an artistic practice of his own. To express and demonstrate the concrete reality of perception, he applies a unique performative grammar, as, for example, in his series in the course of TransLecture, in which the flow of his ideas and thoughts is manifested in captivating drawings, diagrams and arrangements that he makes on a kind of laboratory table, and which are filmed and recorded from above.

Like Avis Newman, who asserts that there is a direct link between drawing and thought when he says that drawing operates as an "account of the functioning of thought" and that it "represents a space of questioning, response and invention, thus becoming a philosophical activity", Gansterer is intimately interested in the processes of transposition of human understanding, appealing to all the senses. He explores the different ways in which these immanent and situational constructions of meaning could evolve into a radical form of autopoiesis in which a line of thought would become a line on paper, a line in space, or a verbalized line and then again a line articulated by the whole body, or, by becoming a collective performance score, an object.