When I opened my gallery in 2003 as a showroom exclusively devoted to contemporary drawings it was driven by the ambition not only to serve as a simple market place like any other regular gallery, but to build up and step by step establish, in a modest way, a platform for exchange, research and discourse about the ever-changing nature of drawing, similar maybe to what, on a very different scale, experienced institutions and non-profit spaces like the London-based Drawing Room or the Drawing Center in New York – whose activities I have followed and admired – have undertaken over the years.

The first opportunity to engage in a collaborative project with experts in the open field of drawing from various academic and institutional backgrounds was the 2005 conference “Räume der Zeichnung�, (Akademie der Künste, Kupferstichkabinett, Freie Universtät, Berlin) and the publication in connection with it which is being released this year.

sturup-drunk-web_vorschau.jpgNow, in 2007, the collaborative project “Drunk on Dreams� (Fukt and D magazine ) is of another kind – yet is nonetheless as important as the project mentioned earlier. Initiated by the gallery as an invitation to the artists Björn Hegardt and Yane Calovski to put up a show and create a publication with carte blanche to conceptualise and collect whatever they would find interesting and inspiring, “Drunk on Dreams� is - in the words of artist Eva Hesse - a total risk, freedom, discipline (or maybe less risk, more freedom, and a lot of work...), but foremost it is an adventurous project as open and surprising as the drawn narratives that it will present.

First of all, what makes it particularly challenging and interesting for me is the fact that it is an artist’s project and therefore brings totally different perspectives into the gallery – different approaches in terms of personal artistic and curatorial experience and perception of the various current activities in the field of drawing. Secondly, “Drunk on Dreams� is a dialogue which brings together two magazines with different aesthetics and focuses on the way they organise their materials, both of them being unique publication experiments covering a very wide range of drawing practises and styles.

fruehsorge contemporary drawings presents ONE STEP BEYOND the first two person collaboration of artists Greg Stone and Mark Lammert.

Like the ancient marinner in Samuel Coleridges famous poem artist Greg Stone’s works seem to exclaim „Brightness, brightness everywhere but no beam of light!“
gregstone-web_vorschau.jpgTheir subject matter is dwelling on the actuell darkness we are surrounded by, a frightning and mysterious darkness, but which is however absolutely indispensible as a backround in order to perceive the nature of light. No white without black.
The allover structure of Stone’s drawings, geometrical and organic forms , psychodelic-like patterns, ornamental shapes all these efforts put into refined and most detailed compositions are aiming to overcome the darkness.
The light of enlightment is a flickering bulb with a filament, dangerously fragile.
The most recent work seem to come from far away, from where the light is finally extinguished. It is the light from stars , already snuffed out of existence millions of years ago. It might be though the light of the living seen from the perspective of the passed away.

Mark Lammert’s material has overcome decomposition. The Bones of animals, colored by an eccentric curator in a musum in Paris at the turn of the century have been his objects of desire and of study for some years. These relics mark the point of intersection between art history and natural history. After Lammert’s scriptorial works (workbooks and the series RISSE) as well after a body of paintings this is his most recent contribution to an artistic research on the relation of body. Space and color. At the same time these works are an arthistorical thesis (proposition) drawn on paper. Not unlikely, would Lammert say, that the avantgarde around 1900 did not only visit the ethnological museum but also the collection the Musee Fragonard. The amazing and unseen colors of Monsieur Petitcolin, taxidermist of that museum anticipate a totally new coloristic understanding, that was brought onto canvases by the artists of modernism many years later.

The exhibition ONE STEP BEYOND presents 60 drawings (oil, ballpoint pen, pencil on handmade paper) by Mark Lammert and 12 drawings (tar on paper/museumboard) by Greg Stone.

Mark Lammert lives in Berlin. He is painter and draftsman but recently he works for theatre productions as a stage designer. Currently for Deutsches Theater in Berlin „Die Perser“. His works are included in many german and international collections.

Greg Stone lives and works in New York. His works are to be found in numerous collections throughout the US and Europe.