The Drawing Collective / FENESTRATION
Opening night, 6 – 8 pm Thursday 26 June
Open until 5 pm Sunday 13 June
Co-curated by Munira Naqui and Lisa Pang
A Composition of Windows1
Essay by Lisa Pang
Fenestration, an architectural term for the design and placement of multiple windows or other openings in a façade, is at once the title and curatorial construct for this group exhibition. Throughout the history of non-objective art and of abstraction, the visualised idea of framed and ordered pictorial space has continued to engage artists, with endless permutations of line, form, colour, material and media possible. The device of an aperture for looking - a fenestra2 - between interior and exterior provides site, border, and potent metaphor for abstract drawings by The Drawing Collective, a global cohort of artist-drawers. While each drawing was made in isolation to fit a uniform (window-like) format, as a collection of individual units on the gallery walls, they translate into a singular schematic drawing.
Through this fiction of windows, one and many, 37 drawings become sites of camaraderie, complexity, and contemporary contradiction. Each artist has a unique window (100 x 20 cm) a space for drawing, and for looking through / at. Objectively stated, windows are known physical facts in the world, openings for light and air in a building. Located on an oft-drawn plan line between inside and outside and as an array of elements in a façade, fenestration is architectural composition. At its most sublime this might be a single oculus, a pendentive circling of arched windows, stained glass splintering coloured light into a dark interior. At its crudest, it might be an opening in a hut. Not so objectively stated, windows offer poetic (as well as conceptual) apertures. Eyes are said to be the windows to the soul. A window is often a metaphor; in art history, the rectilinear picture frame is often cast as a window into another reality, whether idealised representation or a mode that breaks with the past. Marcel Duchamp installed a window into a gallery as a fresh widow, wearing black leather for panes.3 Unlike the opening allowed by a door, a bodily scaled portal, windows are scaled more directly to the gaze. Fenestration in this context is really a way of guiding the act of looking through / at things – here, a collection of abstract drawings. As contemporary artists, we who do look out on our times and events, a window, or a series of windows, is also a good place for making other, non-visual observations.
Camaraderie
The Drawing Collective was founded by artist Munira Naqui over a decade ago. From its inception, when a small group of artists in Paris began discussing what drawing was to them, and what contemporary drawing could be, the group has continued to gather for virtual and actual exhibitions. Its members are united by their work in abstraction as a visual language and drawing as a key aspect of varied studio practices. As Naqui describes it, “abstract drawing (w)as a common ground to connect across geographic, linguistic and cultural barriers.” Now a virtual community of over 35 artists from 15 countries, it is interesting that this type of artist-run collective is very much a feature not only the non-objective / abstract scene4 – but also, of the drawing community5. What often starts out small and local expands over international networks, fuelled by an ethos of inclusiveness, united by a mutual appreciation for the field and a conviction that there is much to contribute to the contemporary dialogue. Another significant characteristic is that these cohorts move in an alternative current, organising forums and exhibitions independently (though occasionally merging with) the art market, gallery and museum systems. Not driven by profit, production, or sales, these projects are primarily motivated by peer engagement and respect, commitment to content / medium and a lot of goodwill. This Fenestration exhibition continues that trajectoryentirely planned, funded, and managed by its artists from a social media platform and online.
And now to the drawings. They arrived one by one, some days in small groups, bearing the marks of travel - handwritten captions, official customs forms in various languages, even the odd stamp. Not to overextend the analogy, but managing this exhibition was as throwing open a window to the breeze, whims of weather, and the vagaries of international postage. While much was achieved virtually, members still had to make and send their drawings to Sydney as physical artefacts. Due to the rectangular format, mostly the drawings arrived rolled in a tube, but some had been pleated, segmented or folded into a flat parcel. To hold a drawing in your hand that has been made by another artist for a common cause is joyous. Having to chase up a lost drawing with Australia Post is disheartening. Opening a waterlogged parcel to draw out a damaged drawing, heartbreaking. At the letterbox, wonder. I admire the way 37 artists working with the same format, have drawn with such variety, skill, abandon, restraint, and experimentation, on such an intriguing assemblage of substrates and materials. Perhaps no other art form would be so amenable, so light and portable, even so playful as drawing is and therefore how suitable it is for travelling the world in a global art exchange. The directness and immediacy of drawing correlate to an attitude of openness –making for a mindset that makes this type of show possible, despite borders, distances and many of the artists never having met.
Complexity
As has been pointed out, windows are functional objects, yet how susceptible they are to design. If a chair is an acid test for design that supports the reclining human body, then a window is a design that supports how a human body looks - out, in, not, or selectively. There is in existence a Window Research Institute (Japan), promoting among other window-related discourse, windowology In an exhibition (2020) it noted a chronological parallel between the emergence of linked modernities in abstraction and in fenestration; “the abstract paintings which appeared in the 20th century became in themselves a pattern for windows in the white cube, and their combinations of geometric shapes also look like arrays of windows.”6 The advent of glass and steel facades as structural elements enabled simplification of form and minimisation of the decorative; without gables, arches and keystones, windows could become simple geometric shapes arranged on a wall, even occasionally dissolving entirely into all-over glass surfaces.
Fenestration is an architecturally framed exercise to one of the ongoing analyses attached to abstraction – the ‘am I looking through / looking at’ self-consciousness that occurs when we confront an artwork on a flat surface. It is a visual pose often seen as pivotal to understanding the development of modernism, and so, of non-objective, nonrepresentative art and abstraction. As the formal occidental tale tells it, while modernism had inherited a system of visual representation that directed a looking through the picture plane, it had evolved by the mid 20th century to a looking at its flat surface. Arguably, the through to at disarticulation is inherent to looking but it is limited as optical critique We look as embodied beings, we lean on the window frame, we peer, we hide, and we interpret the view we see through the lens of our lived experience. In art and architecture, the modern has been with us for the best part of a century, as has abstraction, and as we move in the contemporary Contemporary, abstraction as terminology deepens
Contradiction
Historic and practical considerations of modernity, terminology, the contemporary, and fenestration as the context for these abstract drawings makes for a series of apparent contradictions All of them are brought to looking. Recently at a lecture on Kazimir Malevich’s iconic Black Square7 , I was reminded that the literal translation of nonobjective was art without objects – specifically meaning a way of stepping away from the world known objects and into the realm of subjective feeling and ideas. But just look at the Black Square now.
That once pure and opaque black surface is now fractured by fine cracks, revealing white ground beneath, two earlier paintings, and even an inappropriate pentimento, such that at and through the Black Square come hidden marks, sensation of time passing, and of other narratives seeping It is as if, over time, a fine linear over-drawing has appeared, on the square, unintended by the artist yet so evocative for the viewer
Just as revelations are suggested by the splitting lines of that drawn craquelure, so are they suggested by the titles of these drawings as windows as guides to looking A few formal Untitleds. Some Fenestrations and a Fenestrae. Slightly more descriptive but factualAperture, Composition, Verso Recto, Mesh. Then the referential - In Between, Manuscript, Diverge, Paper Sentience. Ambiguity hovers with Sky Light, Diaphanous Architecture. Increasing the emotional charge, of line, light, shadow and time, Mind Gap, Ruby’s Rainbow, Help is on the Way, and The Moon Looks In Allusions to people, places and spaces follow - Toponymes, A Poem for Etty Hillesum, Four Short Walks, Tracing Ellsworth in Paris 1949.
Look at and through the 37 abstract drawings that make up the windows of Fenestration, and the world, while not represented, is present. Abstraction is a shifting mode, a sliding scale between drawings of geometric order, seriality and restraint and drawings of scaled gesture, expression and lyricism. This corner of the drawing world – this space, this collective, and this gathering have done much to support and sustain a commitment to (abstract) drawing by acknowledging its past as well as its expanding present
Lisa Pang, June 2025
1 “When our architecture is necessarily reduced to facades, we architects make a composition of windows. It is like imitating Mondrian with glass.” Gio Ponti, Architect (1891-1979, Milan, IT)
2 From Latin , meaning opening, window or pore. Biological meanings include openings in bones and the transparent sections of insect wings.
3 Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, 1920, painted wood, leather, 77.5 x 53.3 x 10.2 cm, MoMa New York
4 Just from personal experience; Factory 49 Sydney, Factory 49 Paris Pop Up, Abstraction 2018 Melbourne, Abstract Project Paris, Supermarket Art Fair, International Biennale of Non Objective Art, RNOP (Reductive Non Objective Project), Kontruktivist, Discursive Geometry
5 Draw Space, The Drawing Center New York, Drawing Correspondence UK, Drawing Box
6 Igarashi, Taro, Kikuchi, Tatsuya and Shibata, Naomi, “The Window Through a Windowology Perspective” (2019-20) Exhibition Booklet, Window Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan, p19
7 Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.5 x 79.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery Moscow