STOCKHOLM.- In the exhibition, the audience will encounter about a hundred works by Swedish and international artists with drawing as the lowest common denominator. Exhibited here is art that we recognise as “pen on paper”, but also drawings that are expressed in completely different materials and dimensions. Ninety percent of the material has never before been presented by the museum.

“Yet Another Morning – Drawing in the Moderna Museet Collection” spans more than 100 years and consists of art from the museum’s collection and a handful of older works on loan. The exhibition presents how artists observe and draw their surroundings, themselves and their everyday lives, but also how they express what cannot be seen or “depicted”, such as emotions, thoughts and social criticism.

Annika Gunnarsson is curator of Drawing and Prints at Moderna Museet and curator of the exhibition.

What drawing is and can be

“Yet Another Morning – Drawing in the Moderna Museet Collection” invites us to think about what drawing is and can be. Drawings and illustrations with different themes and techniques are exhibited here together with sculpture, moving images and photographic art.

Common to all of them is the core of drawing – the work with lines, shadows, contours, surfaces and contrasts between blackness and light:

A few strokes capture an entire story, as in works by Jean Fautrier and Alexander Rodchenko, and many others. The painstaking work with thousands of thin marks from the tip of the pen can be seen, for example, in works by Ann Böttcher and Johanna Karlsson.

Others observe themselves, such as Egon Schiele, Helene Schjerfbeck and Bjarne Melgaard, as well as Alberto Giacometti when he lifts his own shadow from the ground into an upright elongated figure. The joy of colour is found in works by Jane Bark, Peter Köhler and Nellie Mae Row, among others.

The monumental scale is represented by Robert Smithson’s spiral drawing of 6,500 tons of stone and clay in Salt Lake City, while the exhibition’s smallest work, by Joakim Pirinen, measures 6.6 x 5.7 centimetres.

“Timeless and immediate”

– Most artists draw and sketch. It is a timeless and often immediate way of expressing yourself. Drawing also has the ability to move freely across cultural and language barriers since almost anyone can achieve something with a pen and paper, says Annika Gunnarsson, curator of Drawing and Prints at Moderna Museet and curator of the exhibition.

“Yet Another Morning” also aims to awaken the visitor’s own desire to draw. The exhibition includes events and programs for the audience, as well as tables to sit down at and grab a pen and paper yourself.