Artists: David Austen,Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Ceal Floyer, Ellen Gallagher, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Patrick Ireland, Alan Johnston, John Latham, Mark Manders, Matt Mullican, Anri Sala, Bojan Šar?evi?, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Cathy Wilkes.

This exhibition explores the possibilities of drawing using non-traditional or indirect means,  while addressing such traditional art-historical subjects as portraiture, narrative, figuration, the seascape, the still life and the decorative frieze.  The specific notion of drawing the exhibition is designed to evoke is one of displacement, deferral or obliquity, as opposed to the more currently popular conception of drawing as gestural, expressive, more or less instantly communicative, and complete in and of itself.  While there is relatively little drawing per se in the exhibition, the various works included conspire to emphasise the status of line, graph, and pulse. 

The title of this exhibition is derived from a small abstract, black-and-white gouache by David Austen, on which is printed a resonant and suggestive phrase he once misheard in conversation: The Secret Theory of Drawing. Olafur Eliasson’s (with Elias Hjörleifsson) grid of drawings, generated by a handmade drawing machine, registers the pitch and sway of a boat on fishing-trips with his father on the Northern seas. Trisha Donnelly’s The Passenger, an obscure homage to Antonioni’s eponymous film, is a suite of eleven drawings displayed in a cycle of eleven successive days. Ellen Gallagher’s large painting consists of sheets of lined, pinkish penmanship-paper and appears to be awaiting the elaboration of the lexicon of debased signifiers of race for which she is best known. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster film ‘Riyo’ is a melancholy night-time reflection on the desire to connect, which traces a line along the banks of a faraway river. Ceal Floyer store-bought frieze is a recursive ampersand motif in black vinyl ‘drawn’ along the length of a white wall. Anri Sala’s Untitled (2004) is a series of eight black-and-white photographs of moths lined up in a corner of a room. Bojan Šar?evi?’s wall-bound ‘drawings’ are accompanied by a video featuring drawing of a more ephemeral variety. Cathy Wilkes’s enigmatic multi-part sculptural tableau juxtaposes sundry found domestic objects with thin lengths of wood positioned in a manner obliquely suggestive of the use of line in drawing.  Mark Manders’s floor-based work deploys rope as a graphic line conjoining the printed word with figurative sculpture in pencil on ceramic. Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s shifting array of found grids and drawing-based explorations of the relationship between two- and three-dimensional depiction has a delicate simplicity that belies its rich deposits of associative meaning; whereas John Latham’s series of One-Second Drawings from the early 1970s are legendary instances of what he termed ‘least events’. Matt Mullican presents an installation of drawings attributed to his hypnotically-induced alter ego, ‘That Person’, who has produced hundreds of drawings over the years. Patrick Ireland is represented by a previously unshown work relating to his seminal ‘Portrait of Marcel Duchamp’ (1966), an ensemble of works derived from mechanically produced ‘cardiogram drawings’. Alan Johnston’s ghostly black-and-white wall drawing is a subtle respone to the gallery’s architecture and Douglas Gordon’s teasing presentation of ‘the daily practice of drawing’ provides an ambiguous conclusion to the exhibition.

This exhibition is a rare opportunity to see works not previously seen in this country by major international artists, drawn from museums, galleries and private collections in Ireland and abroad.