Drawing Room presents Nicola Tyson, Beyond the Trace

Drawing Room presents Beyond the Trace, a solo exhibition of works on paper by British born, New York based artist Nicola Tyson. Predominantly known as a painter, Tyson also works with photography, performance, the written word and more recently sculpture. Underpinning all of her practice is drawing.

Beyond the Trace will be the first solo exhibition in the UK of Tyson’s drawings.  It will include a range of work: sketchbook pages; ‘daily drawings’, made since 2015 and posted on social media; large graphite drawings; and life-sized ink drawings made especially for this exhibition. Working intuitively and from memory, these gestural pencil drawings are a reimagining of the female body; they are highly animated, androgynous, self-contained and surreal.

Isolated on the page, or positioned against lightly drawn lines – suggestive of a landscape – Tyson’s ‘self-organised’ pencil figures hold a strong presence. Appendages that are part human, part animal morph; lumpy torsos sprout spindly legs or a bird-like beak;  a hollow-eyed figure might look out from under a heavy cloak-cum-body part.  In Tyson’s work, a piece of clothing possesses as much figurative potential as a body part.

“The frock is my ‘vacant muse’, as are pelmets, fringes, knickers, bed skirts… all are cathected and repurposed with my pencil”

Using ink allows Tyson to produce large scale works as intuitively as her pencil drawings. In this medium, the metamorphic nature of her figures are realised through fluid lines.

In all of her works, figures stand tall, peering out to meet our scrutiny. Each figure, in its absurdity and humour, expresses the vulnerability of the body subjected to our gaze.

In the late 1970s and early 80s Tyson was involved in London’s post punk music scene, taking photographs in underground clubs whilst studying at Chelsea College of Art.  For a short time she worked as a journalist for the music press, returning to study painting at Central St Martins in the mid-1980s. She moved to New York in the early 90s.

Nicola Tyson (b. 1960, London) has exhibited internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: A Tendency to Flock, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2017); The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis (2017); Living Dangerously, Cleveland Institute of Art; Petzel, New York, (2016).  Group exhibitions include Mutual Admiration Society, Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago (2017); The Marked Self: Self-Portraits between Annihilation and Masquerade, Neue Galerie Graz, Austria (2015); The Nakeds, Drawing Room, London (2014), toured to De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, Sussex, and The Cat Show, White Columns, New York (2013).

Nicola Tyson’s work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Corcoran Gallery of Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Gallery, London.

“When I begin to draw, I have no idea what’s going to appear. I work swiftly, to stay just ahead of the cage of language, the linear mind and rational decision-making. I just let the forms grow themselves, self-organize…” – Nicola Tyson

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Nicola Tyson, Beyond the Trace. A solo exhibition of drawings by the artist
28 September – 12 November 2017
Tues – Fri 11am–6pm Sat and Sun 12 – 6pm Open late until 8pm on the last Friday of every month
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The Drawing Room

Drawing Room explores ideas around contemporary drawing and makes them visible in the public domain. As the only public and non-profit gallery in the UK and Europe dedicated to contemporary drawing, Drawing Room provides a unique resource for the promotion of drawing, its practice, theory and methodology.

The programme incorporates a wide range of ideas and media, from the traditional to the experimental, and is informed by contemporary artistic practice.  It supports the production of new work and acts as a catalyst to test the parameters of drawing, providing opportunities for artists, writers and curators to produce, examine and research contemporary drawing.

Drawing Room was initiated by curators Mary Doyle, Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout to provide the major European resource for contemporary drawing.  It has delivered an ambitious international programme of solo and group exhibitions that have included established, emerging and historical artists.  Many of these exhibitions have toured to galleries and museums throughout the UK and beyond. Since Drawing Rooms inception in 2002 it has been able to deliver an ambitious programme in large part through support from artists.  Since our first Drawing Biennial fundraiser in 2003, over 1,000 works have been made especially for Drawing Room, an endorsement of the value that artists place on the organisation.

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Tues – Fri 11am–6pm Sat and Sun 12 – 6pm Open late until 8pm on the last Friday of every month

Outset Study is open during exhibition hours and for ‘Tea’ Thursdays between exhibitions. For special research visits appointments are recommended, more info here.

Please note the gallery is closed between exhibitions

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How to get to the Drawing Room

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