Frauke Ehmke

Everyday Entanglements

Lower Gallery: Clive Hodgson Working Titles

31 August- 22 September 2007

Go to Ehmke Homepage

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Frauke Ehmke, Untitled (669 km), 150 x 264cm, 2007, ink pen on paper

The vigour and freedom of Frauke Ehmke’s recent large works on paper could be seen as a testimony of drawing’s longevity. They have a quality of going back to drawing’s very beginnings and forward to a future not yet charted or comfortably familiarised. Lines meander with a life of their own, meeting, crossing, knotting up sometimes, unravelling, rolling away, producing areas of dark emphasis and paler areas where the ink in the pens has begun to run dry. Line is an active agent and does not form an outline or a boundary. In these drawings there is no obvious point of focus, there is no overall shape: if some recognisable or classifiable pattern does begin to appear – say the resemblance to a blossom or an explosion – it reduces the drawing’s vitality.

Frauke Ehmke, Untitled (8567 km), 274 x 150cm, 2005, ink pen on paper

The vast field of drawing itself today seems suspended between two poles: on the one hand the great mass of fabricated imagery of every kind which surrounds us and constantly accumulates and multiplies, and on the other the free line in empty space, the ‘line taking a walk’ of Paul Klee, the footloose line. This trembling, exploring, always re-starting line is itself suspended between being a graphic trace of pure energy and being a sign of a linguistic system. This vantage point, or uncertain ground, is where we encounter Frauke Ehmke’s generous drawings.

An excerpt from an essay by Guy Brett titled ‘Consisting of Lines’, 2007

Clive Hodgson, Untitled 1, 2007, 36 x 41cm

Clive Hodgson, Untitled 2, 2007, 41 x 36cm

Frauke Ehmke was born in 1964 in Germany. She attended Camberwell College, London and Central St. Martin's College of Art & Design, London. Ehmke lives and works in London.

Clive Hodgson was born in 1953 in Nottingham. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art, London and lives and works in London.

This will be both artists' first solo exhibitions at Broadbent.