Ewan Gibbs

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present a series of thirteen new drawings by British artist Ewan Gibbs at their Dering Street space.

Gibbs’ interest in travel imagery began 15 years ago when he started making drawings based on photographs found in holiday brochures. Early series included the ‘Typical Interiors’ of Mediterranean villas and the facades of city hotels. Since 2000, Gibbs has predominantly used his own photographs from which to work and it is the cityscape of New York that forms the focus of this exhibition.

Fascinated by the familiarity that draws the viewer into a recognisable subject, be it a view of New York, London or Paris, Gibbs photographs the ‘ready-made’ scenes that all tourists cross off their lists, for example, the Brooklyn Bridge, Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower. The drawings in this exhibition are all titled ‘New York’ and represent the New York we think we know – with its bright taxi headlights and impressively towering buildings. Gibbs painstakingly translates these images into drawings. The resultant works, stripped of colour, detail and photographic clarity, leave an impression of a still recognisable scene made up of row upon row of hand drawn slash marks hung on the scaffold of an invisible grid scored into the paper. Gibbs’ drawings present this familiarity in a reductively minimalist way while simultaneously retaining a sense of the artist’s careful hand.

With a photograph one expects to see greater detail upon closer inspection, yet the illusion created in Gibbs’ drawings dissolves the closer one gets, in turn revealing the intricate detail of the mark making. This repetition and all over nature of the marks deny an easy resting place for the eye and it is only when standing back from the work that one can attempt to arrest and understand the image.

Gibbs was born in 1973 and graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1996. He has exhibited internationally and solo exhibitions include Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, Texas, (2008); Paul Morris Gallery, New York, (2007), and Interim Art, London, (2003). Group exhibitions have included Attention to Detail, (curated by Chuck Close), TheFLAG Art Foundation, New York, (2008); Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins and Ewan Gibbs, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, (2006); Originality and Repetition: the Grid in Contemporary Works on Paper, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, (2005) and Surfacing, Contemporary Drawing, at the ICA, London, (1998). Gibbs has been chosen as the artist to represent the Armory show in 2009 and has been commissioned to make a series of drawings by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art which will be exhibited there in 2010. Public collections include Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.