The exhibition Linie Line Linea is showing works and groups of works by twenty artists who live and work in Germany and place the drawing at the center of their work: a broad spectrum of approaches to drawing that affirms its undiminished, lively topicality in contemporary art. Irina Baschlakow, Marc Brandenburg, Monika Brandmeier, Fernando Bryce, Marcel van Eeden, Gerhard Faulhaber, Katharina Hinsberg, Pauline Kraneis, Pia Linz, Christiane Löhr, Theresa Lükenwerk, Nanne Meyer, Thomas Müller, Christian Pilz, Alexander Roob, Malte Spohr, German Stegmaier, Markus Vater, Jorinde Voigt and Ralf Ziervogel are the participant artists of the exhibition curated byVolker Adolphs. These artists are asking what drawing can be today, how it formulates and alters our perception of ourselves and of our world. The artists selected forgo any combination with other media and do not seek to separate the drawing from the hand that created it; rather, they start out from the line that the hand draws on the paper. In both small-format series and single sheets that fill an entire wall, these artists reflect on the quality and freedom of the line and use it to record internal and external movements, psychological and physical spaces, to orient themselves within the labyrinth of the world’s possible forms, to document or invent reality and translate it into the reality of drawing: space, people, society, history, and dream. It is neither meaningful nor necessary to distinguish between figurative and nonfigurative drawings, much less debate their priority; the goal is rather to describe the associated transitions and coexistences. Far more important is the commonality of the line, which simultaneously establishes and once more transforms both itself and objects.

The exhibition provides an overview of contemporary drawing in Germany. It highlights the extent to which drawing speaks a multilayered language, even when it concentrates on the drawn line as its basic element. Among the different artistic media, drawing stands out as an

independent and unmistakable means of composing exact, authentic images, shaping and changing our perception of ourselves and the world in the process.

Qualities such as speed, suggestion, spontaneity, and directness are generally attributed to the drawing, but it also achieves the opposite as a matter of course: precision, control, distance, order. On the one hand, it is the simplest medium, also in terms of the economy and availability of its means. On the other hand, it can achieve the greatest intellectual and formal complexity from the simplicity of a line. It can be done at any time and any place. Not everyone is an artist but nearly everyone draws and makes signs.

Just as the canvas holds the paint in a painting, the paper holds the line in a drawing. Conversely, the line gives the paper a new quality, making it part of something else, of a drawing. The interrelation of paper and line is particularly essential to the identity of drawing. In painting, space and light are represented by paint, beneath which the canvas disappears, but in drawing, they can be articulated by the paper itself, when the line transforms the part of the plane it has not occupied into the idea of space and light.

Even if the artist defines and instrumentalizes every detail of the drawing, it still tends to remain fragmentary and unfinished. The line points to infinity, wants to be continued and imagined as continuing, by the viewer as well. The single drawing strives beyond itself to the series, as if that were the place to achieve a whole. The drawing is an experiment in perception and thinking that never ends.