Art on Display 1949-69
Drawings by Petra Lunenburg
How do you record an exhibition that hardly anyone has seen because of lockdown? Art on Display 1949-69 featured fragments of historical exhibitions, focusing on the relationship between the spatial design, the artworks and the public. Would photography or film record it accurately? Or has the enforced absence of the public created an opportunity to use other media? What if we enlisted an illustrator to visualise the public interaction with the exhibition that was barely possible because of the pandemic?
Petra Lunenburg has made a series of drawings inspired by Art on Display which aim to capture the atmosphere of the various exhibition fragments and make tangible the encounters with artworks that were so carefully staged by the architects. The series can be seen as a speculative and evocative exhibition archive that, adding to the more commonplace archive of photos and design sketches, evokes rather than records the anticipated confrontation between the artworks and the visitors, their sightlines and their movements, based on a specific spatial scenography.
"I think the idea of expressing and archiving the human and emotional side of an exhibition through drawings is really relevant," says Petra Lunenburg. "Since my work is about human experience, this project brings together many things, for me at least. I have drawn a lot of fashion, and my starting point is almost always the movement or the feeling that the garment evokes in me, the relationship between the wearer and the design. I translate my response to this into a human figure surrounded by directional lines that suggest movement. Although Art on Display is well outside my fashion comfort zone, I've approached it in the same way. I observed myself while walking through the exhibition. How do I move? Which route do I take? And how do I view the displays? What does the object do to me? What do I feel in my body when I enter into a relationship with the exhibits and open myself up to them? And then I discovered another layer: the exhibition fragments without my presence. How do the objects 'talk' to each other? And what if the exhibits themselves become the observers?"
Petra Lunenburg
Petra Lunenburg graduated in fashion design from ArtEZ Arnhem in 1996. Since then, she has worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for numerous fashion labels and magazines. Focusing mainly on illustration and drawing, she has developed a feminine, free and evocative style. Her signature raw, minimalist and abstract technique creates a sense of ambiguity and is influenced by both fashion and art history, by René Bouché and Egon Schiele. She has explored her passion for nudes in a variety of media, including marker pen, ink, chalk and acrylic on paper. Lunenburg reveals a world of allure through sensual and seductive portraits of her subjects.
"Through my drawings I attempt to capture people's animal side, or maybe just their human side," she says. "I am fascinated by the power of the line. As a result, my work always consists of at least two layers. The first layer describes the figure: its posture, facial expression, use of colour and the figurative elements that tell or suggest a certain story. The second layer resides in the lines themselves, their energy, the result of the force of my hand in relation to the resistance of the paper, arising from emotion and the choice of materials. I believe that you can get extremely close to the maker's soul through a line. It's a highly personal, unique and tangible record of a particular moment in time. I think that's why I draw constantly, repeating the same things as a sort of organic process that mutates here and there. Those mutations are often the works that make me think: yes, that's it!"