Triennial ofdrawing and small-scale sculpture – WALK THE LINE

The necessity for the organization of an art exhibition that would represent the contemporary artistic production in the domain of drawing and small-scale sculpture stems from the year 1977 with the establishment of the annual Exhibition of Drawing and Small-scale Sculpture. The fact that said practices continued to be associated with one another, which spreads to the organization of this year’s Triennial, raises a myriad of questions concerning the basis for their interlinkage, their definition, and meaning within the frameworks of contemporary art. While the primary connection between said media resides in their traditionally dominant status within the system of art academies, in their similarities with regard to the possibilities of achieving

immediate artistic expression, and their particular intimate character, it seems that the prevailing

tendencies of contemporary art have informed its present status and character in a manner that differs from the ones that did in the year 1977. This year’s selection, which unites 103 artists and 242 artworks, attempts to define and articulate prevailing tendencies in the domain of drawing and small-scale sculpture and to render the presence of the certain inconsistencies which arise in the analysis of the vast spectrum of possibilities of realization of these artworks manifest.

The focus of the exhibition is to examine the thesis of the presence of the process of the blurring of the boundaries of these art fields, which the exhibition aims to illuminate through a number of works whose categories surpass the definition of drawing and small-scale sculpture.

Souvenirs, interactive installations with the participatory aspects, lines created from barbed wire, 3D prints, drawings in space, and drawings-events are among the artworks that point to the complexity of artistic practice in the domain of drawing and small-scale sculpture, as well as their extension to other media and their interaction with various currents of contemporary art.

Having these considerations in mind, the exhibition’s title Walk the Line, points to the vast spectrum of the possibilities of the conceptualization and realization of works in the domain of drawing and small-scale sculpture, to the problem of their examination with the help of the traditional explanatory frameworks, and highlights the examples situated on the border between various media.

 

Kristina Sedlarević with the Arts Council of ULUS