The art of drawing exists since the beginning of human civilization. From the 70.000-year-old first man-made pictures in caves to digitally created drawings in our virtual world-wide-web, it has always been a form of human expression as well as the fundament of artistic production. During drawings’ evolution from primitivism to scholasticism, to realism and to modern figuration or abstraction they went through a high number of different formal, aesthetic, and conceptual alternations. This is the reason, why the art of drawing is a complex field that still today has kept its place as a fundamental discipline in visual art.

For Ergin İnan, drawing has been a basis of his oeuvre since the mid 1960s. Although he is commonly known and defined as one of Turkey’s most prominent painters, the importance of drawing is always noticeable in his oeuvre. Even the paintings on canvas are often based on lines, multilayered textures and complex hatchings that reveal his use of a brush as much his love for the pen. Of course, color plays always an important role in his works, but the effect of the drawn line which forms the depicted protagonists as well as the whole composition is always present.

The exhibition Pen and Paper reveals the meaning of drawing in the oeuvre of Ergin İnan by presenting works on paper from different periods. In this sense, the exhibition is a retrospective of his drawings that exposes İnan’s artistic progress. Starting with early works on paper from 1960, Pen and Paper reveals the history and present state of the artist’s drawing oeuvre. The exhibition underlines the conceptual power of Ergin İnan’s works on paper as well as their formal structures which combine naturalism, and expressionism with abstraction. Through his unique synthesis of various aesthetics, the artist has created an individual approach to the art of drawing, where the representation of the existential struggle of mankind leads to an extraordinary artistic comment on the ontology of humanity. İnan achieves this difficult task by interconnecting the present with the past, by linking individual stories with general history, as well as by exposing the relationship between the concepts of culture and nature. By depicting the multilayered matrix of our civilization and by embracing a kaleidoscopic notion of reality, his drawings underline the need for a holistic view on art as well as on the world.

The exhibition also means a powerful statement for the importance and for the richness of Fine Art’s oldest discipline. That is why the retrospective is significant for comprehending Ergin İnan’s work as well as for understanding the meaning of drawing for art in general.  

Marcus Graf

Curator