Ewan Gibbs
MoMA Sculpture Garden, New York, 2009
While an art student in London in the 1990s, looking closely at Pop Art and finding intrigue in the …
Using photographs as reference material, Ewan Gibbs creates intricate pencil renderings of familiar tourist sites and city scenes. His drawings are composed of multitude of tiny slash marks derived from knitting patterns, in which he varies the density of each mark to delineate light, shadow, and form. At very close range, Gibbs’ drawings recede into abstraction, but from afar, the representational image emerges from the pencil marks. In this way, Gibbs simultaneously deconstructs, abstracts, and represents, recognizable places and monuments. This transformation is central to his practice.
While an art student in London in the 1990s, looking closely at Pop Art and finding intrigue in the found image, Ewan Gibbs happened across a book of knitting patterns. Printed in black and white, the book distilled the composition of a given pattern stitch-by-stitch with various marks (circles, triangles, hatch …
Using photographs as reference material, Ewan Gibbs creates intricate pencil renderings of familiar tourist sites and city scenes. His drawings are composed of multitude of tiny slash marks derived from knitting patterns, in which he varies the density of each mark to delineate light, shadow, and form. At very close range, Gibbs’ drawings recede into abstraction, but from afar, the representational image emerges from the pencil marks. In this way, Gibbs simultaneously deconstructs, abstracts, and represents, recognizable places and monuments. This transformation is central to his practice.
