Monika Grzymala: Raumzeichnung (Reflection) is a site-specific installation on view at Fabrica in
Summer 2014. The ephemeral art work addresses relationships between drawing and landscape, it
is especially designed for Fabrica in Brighton. Raumzeichnung (German for ‘Drawing Spatially’) is
created in the historic interior of the building with about 11 kilometers of silvery-mirroring tape.
The sculptural drawing reflects the impressive architecture, light in the course of the day and the
spectator walking around. Monika Grzymala installs her monumental pieces by herself and
describes her temporary installations in kilometers of tape used in the process. The threedimensional drawing Raumzeichnung (Reflection) at Fabrica emphasises the power of artistic
creation and relationships between object of art, landscape, architecture and spectator.
With her expansive 'spatial drawings' and works using handmade paper, Monika Grzymala has
developed one of the most unusual approaches to contemporary drawing and installation art. The
starting point for her large-scale interventions – often involving strips of adhesive tape stretched
across the gallery space – is the searching quality and movement of the drawn line, which she
extends into the third dimension by interweaving or knotting the strips together. This
'emancipation' and 'evolution' of the drawn line is Grzymala's primary artistic theme: in her siteresponsive installations – which have already transformed spaces at the MoMA/Museum of
Modern Art in New York (2010), Dian Woodner Collection New York (2010+2014), at 18th Biennale
of Sydney/Australia (2012) and 49 Nord 6 Est FRAC Lorraine Collection in Metz/France
(2011+2013), this year at Villa Zanders Bergisch Gladbach/Germany and Projektraum Galerie
Crone Vienna/Austria, among others – and in her new work commissioned especially for Fabrica in
Brighton, she constantly pushes the boundaries of the line by creating drawings in space – the
image and its support become one.
The artist’s exploration of drawing and line follows a long tradition of art philosophy, yet in recent
years her works have done an impressive job of taking the line out of the two-dimensional sphere.
As early as 1607 Federico Zuccaro confronted the relationship between the concept and the line,
and his ideas led him to proclaim the primacy of the line. According to him, only the drawing was
equal to the “divine act of creation,” since the line is the external form of the idea and therefore
the beginning of everything. For the artist Monika Grzymala (German, born 1970 in Poland), the
line and drawing [is] thought guided by the hand, even though her work long ago left the canvas
and paper, and she weaves her lines sculpturally along walls or expands them into three
dimensions in space. However, everything still starts in drawings on paper. For her, the line is
continuum, beginning and end; it can define and limit both poles, move in one, many, and all
directions, or combine with other lines. It reveals relationships; it is both simple and complex alike.
Monika Grzymala’s Raumzeichnung (Reflection) is part of the commission theme ‘Our Mutable
Landscape’ which uses drawing in its most expanded form to explore the topography of our
emotion, our psychological and aesthetic relationship with the landscape that surrounds us. The
large-scale installation will use kilometers of mirrored tape to transform, to reimagine and redraw
Fabrica’s interior.