current exhibition

With the Mannheim Art Award of the Heinrich Vetter Foundation, the City of Mannheim and the Heinrich Vetter Foundation support professional artists who live and work in the metropolitan region. The award handed over for drawing in 2024 has been split by the jury into a main award for Margarete Lindau and an advancement award for André Wischnewski.

Margarete Lindau (*1975) conducts playfully experimental research in drawings, prints or copy art. Fundamentally graphic thinking and doing form the basis for extensive series of works, in which she explores concepts such as original, oeuvre, copyright or reproducibility. In the linoleum print series ‘Lines of Beauty’, the theme is beauty – therefore, the core of all aesthetics and, for centuries, the object of fierce debates. William Hogarth defines ‘The Line of Beauty’ as the perfectly curved line in his essay ‘Analysis of Beauty’ (1753). Margarete Lindau’s riposte are variants – created more intuitively than calculatedly – on curved sheaves of lines, each of which is printed in six colours using the equally attractive and bold lost mould technique.

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Whereas, in recent years, her visual language in sketches and drawings only faintly hinted at the representational, the drawings in the series ‘blühen’, at first sight, seem to be entirely naturalistic still lifes. Lindau does not draw true to nature, however: her blossom shapes and stalks are combined in impossible plays of lines. ‘copydrawings’, five bundles of them so far, have been produced since 2014, presented in the form of books or single leaflets. In this case, the original is the copy – and with ‘copydrawings 5’, visitors are able not only to obtain a snapshot of the artist’s graphic process, but, through their purchase, they simultaneously influence the print run size of the leaflet at hand.

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André Wischnewski (*1983) makes us the protagonists of his narrative spatial drawings. Modular line elements spread across the walls into the room, becoming a walk-in drawing in which we encounter real things or other persons inserted by the artist in a surreal-looking picture-world. He borrows his formal vocabulary primarily from the comic genre; as he does in the sculptures of the series ‘Von Fall zu Fall’. Time, motion and speed are translated into lines here, to form the image of a fall which, while it could never exist in reality, is nevertheless universally legible as such. For his cut-outs, André Wischnewski dissects comic pages. He removes the images, allowing us, in turn, to fill the vacancies with our thoughts.