IMT Gallery is proud to present Gordon Shrigley’s Love is Colder than Death, a six-year investigation into Drawing and the Language of Line.

In 2001 Shrigley began a project to map out a lexicography of line: “At a certain point I felt I needed to relearn how to draw from scratch by concentrating on the simplest possible type of mark: the horizontal line and seeing where this would lead me.”

Love is Colder than Death follows this quixotic journey through different practices and modes of making, tracing lines between expressive drawing, architectural draughtsmanship, text and the tally mark; overlapping the signification of mark-making in different systems of communication.

At one point sketchbooks preserved in vitrines like museum artefacts contain years of lines. They sit in front of large pencil drawings, extraordinary works composed of individually drawn, straight horizontal lines forming a block of graphite that form a monument to shrigley’s conception of how conscious has developed through the engagement with the mark.

As the work progressed it began to incorporate the accidents of materials and the frustrations of external forces: the series of identical sketchbooks containing scores of horizontal line drawings abruptly changes in size when the only factory manufacturing them burns to the ground. Pages from different years reveal moments of frustration and of calm that, for Shrigley, are suggestive of contemporaneous personal events, like a symbolic polygraph through time.

Alongside these are text works, an architectural model for his forthcoming redesign of an East End gallery and a series of filmed interviews of artist filmmakers directed by Shrigley, into what it means to be a maker of the visual. The last of these are single takes of artists discussing their works in front of a motionless camera. The films play like talking heads or Andy Warhol’s screen tests, with an air of the Dogma 95 manifesto. Unedited they are stark and revealing documents of artists communicating their ideas and their struggle for meaning.

Gordon Shrigley studied at the University of Westminster and the Slade School of Fine Art. He has exhibited in the UK and abroad including Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawing, Berlin; the Musée d’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. He has published a number of artists’ books and art texts with Edition Solitude, Stuttgart; Monaco Magazine, London and Cardboard Folly, Liverpool. He was selected for an artist in residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 1998 and at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath in 2000. His work is held in collections including the Staatsgalerie drawing and print collection, Stuttgart; Akademie Schloss Solitude archive, Stuttgart and the Musée d’art Moderne, Saint-Etienne.

Errant Bodies Book Launch and Talk
Friday 25th November 6:00 – 9:00pm

To coincide with Love is Colder than Death was a book launch of new titles by Brandon LaBelle’s Errant Bodies Publishing including the second volume of Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear. Read on…

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