LONDON.- Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is presenting Convergence, bringing together the works of Susan Schwalb (b. 1944, US) and Caroline Kryzecki (b. 1979, Germany); two female artists of different generations yet with similar artistic endeavours. This remarkable encounter reveals a variety of drawings depicting abstract-geometric structures that are carefully designed and reduced in language. Schwalb’s compositions are elegant, calm and sensitive. Series like Convergence, Polyphony or Aurora connect to musical compositions and nature. Kryzecki’s drawings are based on multi-layered conceptual frameworks. Her compositions are not just decorative pattern but question the formal and conceptual qualities of analogue aesthetics. Both artists introduce new and unusual materials that challenge our perception. Despite their systematic and often theoretical origins, the resulting works reveal great sensual qualities in their use of colour and texture, even if each artist’s chosen media and its effect is substantially diverse. Whilst Schwalb works with metal stylus and silverpoint on gesso, executed on pigment prepared paper or, for a more physical appearance, even mounted on wood panels. Kryzecki uses exclusively ballpoint pen in its commercially most available colours black, blue, green and red.

What unites the works is the reference to their environments: ornamental decorations and musical arrangements, textures and patterns from urban areas and nature phenomena; translated into abstract compositions they result in shifted contexts and realities. Kryzecki’s drawing structures originate – amongst other factors - from a residency she completed in Istanbul and her processing of the multitude of visual impressions she experienced around the city. Repeated architectural elements such as rows of windows, balcony parapets, wall panels, patterned tiles, the fluted surfaces of tree barks and the structures of natural landscapes as well as recurring sound backdrops. The Berlin based artist has developed a complex code system deriving from these repetitive sequences, which forms an infinite variety of arrangements that can be visually overwhelming. A minimum of two layers of identical or similar parallel lines or grids form the basis of each drawing. Set against one another at an angle, with the degree of the angle also changing within certain drawings, the resulting effect of symmetrical designs is partly intended and partly the visualization of a chance process, often generating moiré patterns as if a digital process had gone wrong.

In Schwalb’s case the evolution to abstraction was gradual, yet a logical consequence of her confrontation with the very particular medium of silver- and more generally metal point. Schwalb developed the technique from its attribution to classical genres of figurative drawing towards a contemporary form of visual expression. Schwalb’s compositions are often related to music or musical configurations and natural phenomena. Her works aspire to the atmospheric presence of clouds, wind, water and sunlight reflection as well as the sensual experience of musical orchestration. The American artist employs up to 8 different metal point pens to obtain soft shifts in tone and a shimmering luminosity that give her drawings a poetic dimension and an almost sculptural quality.

Schwalb’s and Kryzecki’s works are about sensory impressions, which are reinterpreted, they convey feelings and moments of deception with all their softer and harder undertones.