1 Tie Not, 2016 Ink on paper 182.9 × 106.7 cm

2 Drawing Room has long admired Nicola Tyson’s paintings and drawings. Nicola is among a generation of women artists who have embraced the female On seeing a recent exhibition of her work in New York, I was struck by the figure in their work. Nicole Eisenman (born 1965), shares with Tyson a feminist vulnerability of her drawings. Inspired by the energy and complexity of these disposition, and the late Maria Lassnig (1919–2014), like Tyson, used herself as works, I invited her, without hesitation, to show at Drawing Room. subject to explore the body and its representation. Tyson deals with the persona and its many contradictory guises. In the colour monotypes, painted with acrylic We were delighted with her wholehearted response to do something ambitious on glass, the focus is the portrait head. The resulting image is reversed onto paper and the result is two new large-scale works on paper made for the exhibition, a and worked into, offering a further disassociation with its reading. Through titles suite of colour monotypes and a series of recent drawings to be shown in the UK (assigned after making) such as Self-Portrait: Tired (red sweater); Self-Portrait: Coy; for the first time. Born in Britain and living in Upstate New York since 1989, Tyson and Self-Portrait: Worried, Tyson humorously declares herself as subject. is mainly known as a painter, but drawing is the foundation of all her work. Beyond the Trace presents the first comprehensive exhibition of her drawings in the UK. Other drawings evoke the landscape where Tyson lives, in the upper Hudson valley, inhabited by animals that she has adopted, including donkeys, bees and fowl. In Tyson’s drawings are intuitive; by working fast, the hand takes the lead, providing small scale and sketchbook drawings, hybrid bee or bird-like human forms appear, the spontaneity she requires to be surprised and unnerved by what unfolds. She dipping their beaks or proboscis into nectar and winged creatures sweep and soar has spoken of drawing as ‘mapping around with a pencil’ – a means to give and above the fields. These figures appear to be journeying from one place to another. find form on the page – a subconscious cartographic process that allows the freedom to conjure images from nothing. Once an image suggests itself, she begins Tyson’s practice seems to be marked by observation – whether her childhood to build the detail, the shading and shadows, using lightly and heavily worked pastime of birdwatching, or, in her formative youth, observing people through the graphite or ink pen. lens of her camera. In the late 1970s and 80s, whilst studying at Chelsea College of Art, Tyson was involved in London’s post punk music scene, taking photographs Tyson is interested in a re-imagining of the female body to describe what it feels of the characters in the underground clubs, capturing their habits, flamboyancy like to be contained within that body. Her figures are female and morph odd and androgynous dress. For Tyson observation and transformation invite infinite appendages that are part human, part creature or animal; they are malformed with possibilities to explore the vulnerability of the body and capture its being in spindly legs and stumpy feet, arms turn into wings, a face might sprout a bird-like the world. beak, or hollow eyes look out gauntly under a heavy weight of hair that descends into the form of a billowing dress. As the artist says: ‘I conjure entities that are in We included Nicola Tyson in our group exhibition The Nakeds in 2014. Through the process of becoming, transforming or collapsing into something else.’1 solo exhibitions we can present a deeper understanding of the importance of drawing for individual artists; Nicola’s enthusiasm to use this opportunity to Mainly isolated on the page, the sometimes life-size figures stand, stride or dance experiment and try out new processes has produced an inspiring exhibition that across their space, usually demarcated by a finely drawn horizon line, and look presents her singular approach to drawing. out to meet our gaze. Tyson’s figures are highly animated, androgynous, self- contained and surreal. Absurd and often humorous, these drawings express the Mary Doyle, Co-Director, Drawing Room vulnerability of the body, its physicality, its psychological desires and curiosities.

‘I don’t think of the body as a bag of organs or an arrangement of contours, but 1. Nicola Tyson, Works on Paper catalogue (New 2. Ibid, p. 81 as a constantly shifting set of intangible co-ordinates.’2 York: Petzel Gallery, 2016), p. 80

4 5 Great Pants, 2016 Ink on paper 182.9 × 106.7 cm Nicola Tyson’s grotesque bodies and faces

Drawing may be the starting point for Nicola Tyson’s better-known work in Pencil Stub, 2016 Ink on paper painting, but for the artist it is also an end in itself. Most of her drawings, in 182.9 × 106.7 cm fact, are made for their own sake. ‘When working in a sketchbook, it’s only those [drawings] that feel like they could be developed further, through the introduction of colour, that I pull out and use as the basis of a painting,’ Tyson insists.1 In those instances, she tends to project what may have been a rapidly executed drawing directly onto canvas, before beginning the painstaking process of fleshing it out with colour.

The artist has often distinguished the slow and deliberate manner in which she paints from her more intuitive and quickly executed drawings; but that’s not to say that all her drawings are dashed off. ‘The larger drawings can be extremely slow to complete because they may involve shading and cross-hatching,’ she explains. ‘I feel my way to completion – much as I do with paintings – and may leave and return to them over many days or weeks.’ The recent and new works on paper brought together for Beyond the Trace at Drawing Room vary considerably in their size, the materials used (ink, graphite, acrylic paint) and format (vertical, horizontal, square).

The scale of the work determines the thickness of the paper support; for her larger drawings the artist tends to prefer thicker, more resilient paper stock. Opting for graphite or ink does not radically alter the way the artist works since, as she puts it, she ‘very rarely need[s] to erase anything: ‘mistakes’ are incorporated or used as a springboard for gear changes in mark-making’. Tyson admits that working like this can be nerve-wracking but for her it is ‘the only way to get to and keep on target in finding a ‘truthful’ image – one that grows itself’. To understand what she means by this, we must delve deeper into the intuitive and fluid – as opposed to rational and deliberate – process of working that the artist favours when attempting ‘to lay down the energetic structure of the drawing’.2 To get at the truthful image, she lets the hand guide her, ‘bypassing that rational decision-making, pattern-recognition, problem-solving part of thinking’. The hand, not the eye. Tyson confides that she has been known to draw with her eyes closed on occasion, at least to start with, and that she barely looks at the image until it is done.

8 In drawing as in writing, the hand appears to have a mind of its own. Tyson The Gaze, 2015 Graphite on paper acknowledges that the hand responds to signals from her brain, whether it is 19.1 × 19.1 cm the brain seated in her head, her heart or her gut, elaborating:

‘When sketching or laying down – capturing, it feels like – the basics for a more involved drawing, it feels as if I must let the hand find the image and try not to interfere, until I feel I have captured the necessary information, a presence. Successful images – ones that are alive – will appear unfamiliar to me, in that I could not have thought them up, contrived them.’

Underscoring the sheer material variety that illustrates the versatility of the drawing medium is Tyson’s quest for an ‘unfinished’ quality: ‘The danger is in over finishing, once the process slows down. I try to leave the drawing at a point where the viewer gets to finish it […], by observing those energies at the point when they are just about to fall still and stop. This is the case in painting too – to keep the image alive so that it completes each time you look at it.’

The series of five enigmatic ink drawings from 2016 perfectly illustrate the point the artist alludes to in the above statement. These works – each of which features the bare outline of a female figure spanning the full picture frame, practically from head to toe – are quite literally life-sized at 182.9 × 106.7 cm. Their slightly tilted heads, turning torsos, arms either outstretched or akimbo, and above all, legs striding forth, unnaturally foregrounded and noticeably wider towards the bottom, to said ‘private parts’ not only in this series of images – most notably the one forcefully convey a sense of movement, of barely contained energy. The limbs peter titled Pencil Stub (2016), featuring an outsized vagina dentata and breasts with out, appear to be stunted or barely suggested, as in the twin circles that stand for unusually large nipples staring at the viewer like a second pair of eyes – but also in hands (or is it fists?) and elsewhere for ovaries in Uteryne (2016). The title offers a some of the tall and rather narrow graphite drawings on view in Beyond the Trace. possible reading of the image with its prominent central lock motif representing, Untitled (2008), for instance, depicts a spindly figure whose torso, decked with on one level, the female womb. Yet the crenellated end of the contraption, which is gaping white breasts, takes the place of a face deliberately left out of the frame so also the hemline of a short skirt, makes this viewer think of the chastity belts which as to generate ambiguity. The breasts and hint of a navel become surrogate facial crusading knights would use to lock the ‘private parts’ of their spouses, guarding features, not unlike in René Magritte's highly disturbing painting Rape (1945). That them against temptation during their prolonged absences. said, the artist is keen to distance herself from surrealist dream (and nightmarish) In ‘Nicola Tyson in Conversation with Herself’, the artist notes, in response to a imagery, as well as automatic drawing techniques associated with the likes of question she puts to herself regarding the word ‘frock’, that the term ‘private parts’ André Masson, which spring to mind in relation to Tyson’s own largely intuitive is something of a misnomer when it comes to female genitalia, given that ‘women’s process of drawing. For one thing, Tyson does not wish to be labelled in any way. ‘parts’ aren’t private property – they’re viewed as available to, yet are policed by, Also, from the 90s onwards, she has been striving to go beyond what she calls her the patriarchy... indeed are its private parts.’3 This may explain the emphasis given own ‘learned male gaze’ in order to find ‘new imagery that could tell us something

10 11 Proboscis, 2015 Hefty butterflies Graphite on paper begin their 19.1 × 19.1 cm migration, 2015 Graphite on paper 19.1 × 19.1 cm

about ourselves (women) that we hadn’t seen represented before – the intuitive In its contemporary and painterly guise, the genre has been dominated by male female body as experienced – lived in – not a surreal one of the art historical kind.’ artists whose work ‘tends towards provocatively sexualised depictions of women’, as Jonathan Griffin points out in his essay on ‘The grotesque’ published in Tate Tyson’s transgressive, porous and permeable bodies, with their exposed sexual Etc.4 Griffin counts Tyson among the female artists – alongside Dana Schutz, parts and prominent orifices, align her work with the grotesque sensibility. Nicole Eisenman and Tala Madani – who in recent years have turned to making The grotesque, from the Italian word grotto, has its roots in the Renaissance grotesque images of women in a bid to claim the grotesque for themselves and rediscovery of Roman frescoes depicting hybrid creatures caught in a dense web of counter the male hold on it. In his eyes, the feminist artists who exemplify this floral patterns. Yet the wider concept owes as much – if not more so – to Mikhail trend, ‘share a sensitivity to the interior experience of the female body, and Bakhtin's classic study Rabelais and His World (1965), and his understanding of the the ways in which that inner space projects into the outside world’5, effectively ‘grotesque body’, as illustrated by the family of giants and other larger-than-life dissolving the boundaries between self and other. characters who people the French sixteenth-century author’s subversive literary oeuvre. Tyson’s tall drawings – in particular Untitled (2009), with its outsized This kind of sensitivity is reflected in two new works made especially for the turbaned head that evokes a Charles Rennie Mackintosh rose pattern, and the show at Drawing Room, The Selfies (2017) and The Secret (2017). These twin bulbous, Bellmeresque, maimed and contorted body of Untitled (2009), ending in horizontal graphite drawings were intended as a counterpoint to the verticality exquisitely drawn hoofs – partake of this sensibility. of the other works on view. The format is dictated in part by their subject matter;

12 13 A Simple Hair Piece, the two female ‘sitters’ in The Selfies are crying – one has ray-like tears streaming 2015 Graphite on paper down her cheeks and the other dark puddles beneath her eyes beside other tell-tale 19.1 × 19.1 cm signs of disarray. In her Anti-Selfie series of photographic self-portraits, the Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo systematically records all the occasions on which she has cried. Tyson’s The Selfies also wilfully subvert selfie norms and the expectation that women always have to smile, look pretty and appear available. Tyson pokes fun at this in ‘Dear Man on the Street’, the first of her mock-epistles published together as Dead Men Letters. In this one instance, she takes on not a famous male artist but rather the obnoxious passer-by who tells her to ‘smile’, prompting her to do so when she least feels like it.6

In her monotypes Tyson uses colour to further sabotage such ‘mandated behavior’7. Despite the bright red lips and playful polka-dot patterned orange frocks in Self-Portrait: Coy (2016) and Self-Portrait: Worried (2016), these figures are hardly alluring in the traditional sense. There is nothing remotely sexy about the featureless faces, by turns gaunt and bloated, framed by ever receding brown hairlines and clothing items whose random shades and patterns (‘green shirt’, ‘black turtle neck’, ‘dots’, etc.) spell out different modes of fatigue in the works sharing the title Self-Portrait: Tired (all 2016). At the close of her interview with herself, Tyson describes these monotypes as a species of printing, since the acrylic paint is first applied to glass and then printed onto paper in reverse. Yet they also represent another way to draw, as the marks we see are the result of strokes made each represents two women, in marked contrast to other works in the exhibition on the back of the paper. This ‘back-to-front way of working’, as her interviewer which, by and large, feature solo figures. Some of these are the artist herself calls it, has the advantage of allowing her to ‘drop directly into color’ and move under different guises – most explicitly so in the colour monotypes, referred to as beyond the confines of the graphic line.8 ‘self-portraits’ rather than as ‘portrait heads’, a more neutral label that leaves the identity of the subject open. Agnieszka Gratza The Selfies show two female heads side by side, as if tied together by their hair, respectively shorter and longer, which forms a flowing boundary between the artist’s fictional self and her other half. ‘I wanted to return to exploring characters 1. Nicola Tyson, in an email exchange between the 4. Jonathan Griffin, ‘The grotesque’, Tate Etc. in relationship to one another,’ Tyson says of these two drawings. Whether lovers author and the artist, 6 September 2017. Unless Issue 26, autumn 2012, p. 101 5 or merely friends, their closeness suggests an intimacy, just as the two faces, seen otherwise indicated, all quotations are from this . Ibid. interview 6. Nicola Tyson, ‘Dear Man on the Street’, Dead in profile – one leaning in towards the other, as she gazes into the distance – subtly 2. Jenny Bahn, ‘The Shape of Things’, interview, Letter Men, (London: Sadie Coles HQ; New York: convey the exchange of confidences in The Secret. The ‘selfie’ is to a ‘self-portrait’ Office magazine, 2017 Petzel Gallery, 2013), n.p. 3. Nicola Tyson, Works on Paper catalogue (New 7. Ibid. what a ‘snog’ is to a ‘kiss’: a refreshingly pop way of deflating loaded art historical York: Petzel Gallery, 2016), p. 78 8. Nicola Tyson, Works on Paper catalogue (New subjects (Snog, in the 2015 ‘daily drawings’ series, is a case in point). On top of that, York: Petzel Gallery, 2016), p. 81

14 15 Untitled, 2009 Untitled, 2009 Graphite on paper Graphite on paper 117.4 × 41.9 cm 117.4 × 41.9 cm Standing Figure #3, 2014 Graphite on paper 99.1 × 64.8 cm Self-Portrait: Self-Portrait: Coy, 2016 Worried, 2016 Acrylic on paper Acrylic on paper 25.4 × 17.78 cm 25.4 × 17.78 cm Self-Portrait: Self-Portrait: Tired (black turtle Tired (red sweater), neck), 2017 2017 Acrylic on paper Acrylic on paper 60.96 × 45.72 cm 60.96 × 45.72 cm Artist’s Biography Image credits Acknowledgements Nicola Tyson has been a great pleasure to work 1960 Nicola Tyson (b. , London) lives and works Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York, with during the preparation and making of this 1 5 7 in New York, USA. Studied at Chelsea School of photo: Lucas Page: p. , , ; photo: Jason Mandella: exhibition. We offer our deepest gratitude for 9 11 12 17 Art, St. Martins School of Art, and Central St. p. , , , . her enthusiasm, commitment and generosity Martins School of Art in London. Recent solo in making extraordinary new works for this exhibitions include Mutual Admiration Society, Courtesy the artist, Sadie Coles HQ, London and exhibition. Our thanks to Agnieszka Gratza for exchange exhibitions with Susanne Vielmetter Los Petzel, New York, photo: Jason Mandella: p. 10. her thoughtful and engaging essay on Nicola’s Angeles Projects, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago drawings. (IL); Paintings and works on paper 2005–2016, the Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London: We thank Sadie Coles, Pauline Daly and James Museum St. Louis, Missouri; A p. 14, 15. Tendency to Flock, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2017); Cahill at Sadie Coles HQ for their support of the exhibition and the catalogue. We extend Works on Paper, Petzel Gallery, New York; Living Courtesy of the artist, Susanne Vielmetter Los our thanks to Friedrich Petzel, Jason Murison Dangerously, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Angeles Projects, and Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Lucas Page at Petzel, New York; Susanne OH (2016); Goodbye/Hello, Galerie Nathalie photo: Tom Van Eynde: p. 18, 19, 20, 21. Obadia, Paris (2015); Trouble in Happiness, Susanne Vielmetter and Ariel Lauren Pittman at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects for their kind (2014); Nicola Tyson: Bowie Nights, at Billy’s Club, assistance. London, 1978, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2013). We appreciate the continuing support of Arts Select group exhibitions include ISelf Collection Council England, the artists who contribute to – Creating Ourselves: The Self in Art, Whitechapel our Drawing Biennials, Outset Contemporary Art Gallery, London (2017–18); Artistic Differences, ICA, Fund and our Drawing Circle members: Marie London; Receipt of a Magical Agent, Center for Elena Angulo and Henry Zarb, David Bickle, Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on- Brian Boylan, Patrick Heide, Amrita Jhaveri, Hudson, New York (2016); The Marked Self: Between , , Roland Augustine Annihilation and Masquerade, Neue Galerie Graz, and Lawrence Luhring, Lyceum Capital, Stephen Graz, Austria (2015); and The Nakeds, Drawing and Sigrid Kirk, Veronique Parke, Karsten Room, London / De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Schubert, Peter St John, , David Sea, UK (2014). Zwirner Gallery and our Network members.

We thank the board of Tannery Arts and Drawing Her work is in the collections of Museum of Room Advisory Board members for their advice Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of and support: David Austen, Andrew Bick, David American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum Bickle, Brian Boylan, John Boxall, Irene Bradbury, of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Ken Hawkins, Amrita Jhaveri, Sigrid Kirk, Sarah Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Solomon Macdonald, Sir Michael Craig Martin, Allegra R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Pesenti, Veronique Parke, Andrew Renton, Art Center, Minneapolis; Corcoran Gallery of , Katharine Stout, Grant Watson. Art, Washington D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, We highly value our small team and thank the Washington D.C; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los following members of staff for their hard work on Angeles; Tate Gallery, London; UBS Bank Public Nicola Tyson, Beyond the Trace: Silvia Denaro, Collection; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona. Suzie Jones, Jacqui McIntosh, Yamuna Ravindran and volunteers Tayler Harriman, Emily Knapp, Stella Choi, Ellie Tonna, Aimee Sawicki and Niamh Wilson.

Mary Doyle and Kate Macfarlane, Co-Directors, Drawing Room

24 25 Published in 2017 by Drawing Room, London, on the occasion of the exhibition:

Nicola Tyson, Beyond the Trace 28 September – 12 November 2017

Drawing Room Tannery Arts, Unit 8 Rich Estate 46 Willow Walk London, se1 5sf United Kingdom www.drawingroom.org.uk

Images © the artist unless noted otherwise Texts © the authors For the book in this form © Drawing Room All rights reserved.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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ISBN: 978-0-9932199-5-5

Edited by Mary Doyle Copyedited by Jacqui McIntosh, Kate Macfarlane Designed by Marit Münzberg