Frank Gerritz - Wall Drawings
Wall Drawings
ROUGH CUTS
Rough Cuts I and II are notable for their scale, which was larger than any drawing—either on the wall or on paper—Gerritz had done before. Gerritz was questioning how big a drawing could be, wondering when it stops being a drawing and becomes part of architecture. The two drawings faced away from each other on either side of a corner. Since the drawing was on the wall itself, this meant the lines that divided the drawn sections connected to the rest of the room. In this sense,even beyond the fact that there is no paper, nor any frame to delineate an actual edge of the drawing, the drawing was continuous with the room, part of it rather than an object placed in it. Extract from 'Five Wall Drawings', an essay by Alison Green
COLUMN DRAWING
Frank GerritzThe Column Drawing, 1992Graphite pencil on column
400 x circumference 180 cm
Stark Gallery, New York, NY, USA
At the centre of this room was a column and I had to make an art piece out of it!
... we had a restorer sand everything down. I wasn’t interested in the decorative detailing, just the round middle section, which I wanted to turn into a drawing. This 'core' is something, at least for me, which is equally as important as the wall. The column supports the entire building and ties the architecture together.At the time I think Alison [Green] remarked that the work was like Brancusi’s Endless Column. Indeed, as the gallery was located on the third floor of an eight floor building, it would have been possible to repeat the drawing on each floor.Maybe it was a coincidence, but when I hugged the column I could put my fingers together, the circumference was, yet again 180 cm, a measurement that would come to follow me throughout my work.
CENTER DRAWING
HEADLINE
Frank Gerritz
Headline, 1995Graphite pencil on wall
20 x approx. 2000 cm
Kunstraum Neue Kunst, Hannover, Germany
As its title most literally suggests, Headline was drawn according to Gerritz’s already established dimensions for sculptures and drawings. It was at head-height and 20 cm high, a nearly 20 meter-long horizontal scan around the room in the wall space Gerritz would typically use for hanging his drawings. Extract from 'Five Wall Drawings', an essay by Alison Green
LOWDOWN
Frank Gerritz
Lowdown, 2008Graphite pencil on wall
160 x 900 cm
Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany
Lowdown ... points to an early moment in Gerritz’s life—before his career as an artist—when as a teenager he was active in Hamburg’s Punk scene. Lowdown is a song by the British band Wire, which Gerritz first heard on the compilation album, ‘Live at the Roxy’ (1977). It’s a slow burn of a song, Blues-inflected, keyed low, and repetitive. Gerritz’s drawing, a long, horizontal rectangle set flush with the floor, takes the song’s title literally and also emotes its heavy style. He’s interested that the drawing takes up a space few artworks have ever occupied in the room.
For Gerritz Lowdown also signifies the stage a band plays on, which, like the drawing is about neck high, but never over the head. There are also explicit parallels to be made between “live”versus “studio” music and the differences Gerritz sees between his wall drawings and the works he makes in the studio.
Extract from 'Five Wall Drawings', an essay by Alison Green
