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Centre for Recent Drawing presents contemporary drawings selected by collector Stuart Evans. Artists featured include Heiko Blankenstein, Nadja Bournonville, Richard Forster, Neil Gall, Ewan Gibbs, Louise Hopkins, Michael Landy, Keisuke Maeda, Alessandro Raho, George Shaw and Eduardo Stupia. The interpellation of the collector's role in respect of drawings in a museum and gallery context, the former artifactual, the latter artistic, has its own special history for the drawing context. In presenting drawings from the collection of a collector, in this case selections from London collector Stuart Evans, another layer of reading of the drawings is possible, and the viewer must contend with the desires of the artist and those of the patron. Evans sees evoked in these drawings a dignity of labour, of dedication, and painstaking time. He remarks that many artists, and the economy of art, can't support such time as is given over to these works, and as such they are precious documents of lives and love spent.


George Shaw carefully describes the detritus of Bacon's studio, the scrunched paper and rags of the floor and the paint-marks of the studio door, combining portraiture, memory and an interest in the significance of the everyday. Evans sat for Michael Landy's portrait -Stuart (2008) for sixteen hours, the recipient of the objectifying gaze of the art/artist-as-Subject. Alessandro Raho demonstrates drawing as an act of looking through the intermediary of the photograph, his careful marks offering a counterpoint to the cold touch of fashion photography. Richard Forster channels Warhol, but gives us Pop from a humanist point of view: as not just an idea but a lived experience. Ewan Gibbs transforms the image through drawing, evoking optical history from Pointillism to pixels, and Bournonville uses pencil on paper to deliver an ultimately ambiguous judgement in drawing's capacity as a robust and communicative medium. Keisuke Maeda's work operates at the level of reference that folds back on itself - a photorealist drawing of a drawing leaves us trapped by the seduction of the trompe-l'oeil and our own phenomenal aspect. Heiko Blankenstein's visual inventions develop their own motifs in high-energy picture making that elude the delivery of a precise meaning in the image, while Eduardo Stupia risks the demands and drama of invention, leaving us with a sense that each line, and Stupia's experience along those lines, is deeply felt. Louise Hopkins engages in a self-reflexive anatomy of drawing - of the surface, the mark, the line, the edge, notation, shading and depiction, and Neil Gall ultimately renders the sublime of field and surface as he models various skins of material.