Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to present the third solo exhibition of German artist Isabel Albrecht at the gallery, ‘Lines & Forms’, showing her most recent, title giving, body of works on paper.
Created as pairs, the new works on paper expand Albrecht’s rigorous drawing approach into the field of colour and form: the layered compositions of horizontal and vertical lines of previous drawings are overlaid with colourful geometrical shapes.
Triangles, circles, squares and rhombic shapes are introduced as additional visual vocabulary. The modernist forms imbue her repetitive working practice with a new sense of measure and wholeness.
The resulting geometric projections deepen Albrecht’s visual explorations into the third dimension from careful visual shifts to confident spatial presence.
Though more experimental and playful, the working process behind the drawings remains unaltered: Albrecht follows preset parameters of self-imposed regulations and tries to rigidly adhere to them, yet the imperfection of human execution and separation of the drawing processes makes the outcome always unanticipated and to some extent coincidental.
Applied over a prescribed system of graphite lines, Albrecht fills the given structure with translucent lines in ink and watercolour, either finely tonally nuanced or executed in shades of bright colours.
Only exception in the scope of small format drawing pairs is a large-scale diptych specifically realized for the London exhibition, wherein the recurrent motive of cascading grey vertical lines is overlaid by rectangular shapes in aquamarine blue.
Created by the RA graduate as an ongoing series, "Lines & Forms", further develops Albrecht’s research into abstract, colour coded schemes that are anchored between intuition and ratio, between chance and control, moving from systematic drawing and colour progressions to optical illusion and onwards to a kind of drawn spirituality.
The result is drawing as visual thinking, shifting between the formal and the ephemeral.
Isabel Albrecht studied Drawing at Camberwell College of Art from 1998 to 2002 and did her Master at the Royal College of Art from 2002 to 2004. She has exhibited internationally and is part of numerous private collections in Europe and the United States.
Albrecht lives and works in Frankfurt.
In occasion of the exhibition a selection of a special edition of 50 catalogues commenced in 2009 with unique hand drawn covers by the artist will be first shown in London.