Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon: Shared Drawing | 01.04 to 28.04.2022
Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon have been making sculpture together for over thirty years. Following Holtermann’s recent show Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon: Shared Sculptures (2021), this exhibition showcases their recent collaborative works on paper from the series We Thought About It A Lot.
“Thinking about these new drawings in relation to the democratic processes of their previous shared works brings to the fore the rich sculptural life these flat works enjoy. Construction has been exchanged for layering and over-layering as each artist takes it in turn to tell their side of the story, building up out of the surface of the paper, piece by piece, drawing/painting by painting/drawing. They are very ‘mixed media’, to use a term that came into its own in the 1970s when these artists were starting off. Most employ collage, with cut-out paper and fabric, and alongside more familiar art materials such as ink, paint, graphite, wax crayon and oil stick, we find more surprising constituents like coffee and natural dyes, such as oak gall, sloe berries and red wine. One of the artists even fashioned his own felt-tip pen to deploy the home-made ink they had produced.
The surprising and exploratory hybrid life that their shared work has always had – at once for them as artists and us as viewers – shines powerfully through these drawings. So too does the energies and pleasures of actual making as time and time again in these new drawings, we find motifs sparking off each other: soft against hard, spiky geometries combining with watery and cloudy forms, and subtle washes contrasting with powerful colour clashes. Working together in Woodrow’s studio-laboratory, away from home but at home, we can see both artists – and ‘Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon’ once again in their element.”
Dr Jon Wood