Lecture | Erasurehead: Drawing and the dialectics of constructive destruction

Join us for our online Summer Lecture Series; Artists, curators and writers look in-depth at ideas and approaches to art and the creative endeavour through talks and conversations. Curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, lectures are held Wednesday evenings live on Zoom. 

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Robert Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame 25 1/4 x 21 3/4 x 1/2 in. (64.14 x 55.25 x 1.27 cm) Collection SFMOMA, purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis, 98.298

Deleting and erasing is by far more than the simple inverse formula of creative, additive drawing. Those who draw usually also erase. However, erasing as a correction of the creative process is only one of many ways of using the subtraction of the material. Numerous artists of the 20th and 21st centuries use forms of erasure for their drawings. This very specific artistic gesture of "destruction" succeeds in a special way in giving content-related questions a formally compelling expression. It was the American artist Robert Rauschenberg who, in 1953, erased a drawing by his fellow artist Willem de Kooning, thus creating a conceptual work based on the factual destruction of another work. Since then, artists have repeatedly dealt with the dialectic of creation and destruction. This lecture will discuss the formal, technical and aesthetic aspects of erasing as an artistic strategy, using selected examples from the history of recent drawing.    

Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge has been working in various fields of the arts for the last 30 years. Having studied Art History, Film and Theatre, as well as English Literature and History, he worked as Assistant Director in theatre before entering the art world, first as an Art Critic, then Assistant in a commercial gallery, and since then a Freelance Curator and Writer. In 2003 he founded The Drawing Hub, the first gallery in Germany exclusively devoted to contemporary drawing, that later turned into a not-for-profit nomadic platform. He has worked for other international galleries and art fairs, among them, König Galerie (Berlin/ London/ Seoul), Borch Editions (Berlin/ Copenhagen), DDessin Paris, DrawingRoom (Lisbon/ Madrid) and Paréidolie (Marseille). Currently he is Thesis Advisor at the Paris College of Art and Guest Lecturer at UWE Bristol and Plymouth College of Art. He has taken part in exhibitions in Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Maastricht, Rimini, and Bristol. His most recent show has been Les Danaides at Christian Berst Gallery in Paris.