Drawing Now 2025

The selection of works and artists on offer at this 18th edition of Drawing Now invites us to question the foundations of art, its origins, its migrations through different media and techniques, to which we can turn to draw what gives meaning to our ethos.

A case in point is the exceptional focus on a vast group of historical drawings by Christian Jaccard, never before exhibited. This corpus of drawings is all the more significant in that it reveals a form of figuration inspired by cave art, such as these drawings inspired by prehistoric Venus or carved flint, which the artist considers to be the birth of art, or more precisely “the infancy of art”.

Last year,Clément Bagot produced drawings of exceptional meticulousness, evoking in the viewer the memory of glimpsed images such as reproductions of the infinitely small, or views from space, of a fantasized territory with city maps. The new series presented for Drawing Now attests to a spectacular reversal, with the reintroduction of a form of figuration, but a pareidolic figuration in which the images unfold strata of almost antinomic representations, with their ruptures of scale and ambiguous relationships with reality.

In recent months,Claire Trotignon has begun to reverse the guiding principles of her collages. The intrusion of blue backgrounds now responds to the obviousness of classical architectural elements, which have become the central motif of compositions that interweave different times, the notion of ruin and the ecological dereliction of our world. Whatever the format, these colorful new works assert a critical monumentality towards the order of contemporary images.

Following on from the work presented last year, the Chevalme sisters have broadened the horizons of their quests. In place of images drawn from photographs of former colonists and then enhanced with facsimile stamps, they have substituted large images also drawn from heritage collections, this time selecting more official, more imposing views of life in the colonies at the beginning of the twentieth century. These new drawings are enhanced by a second drawing, silkscreened with gold flakes, depicting scenes of ordinary contemporary life in Africa.

This artist duo is developing a committed multidisciplinary practice. Fascinated by the structure of the world's cultures, by the tensions that emerge from them, by the traces of history in the very folds of the collective unconscious, they never cease to uncover the unthinking that structures identities, notably by questioning the relationship between Western and African culture.

Kim N Kosiahn, who will be taking part in Drawing Now for the first time, uses her inks to capture the reminiscence of things felt and experienced during her childhood in Vietnam, a country shattered by war. Far from retranscribing reality, these delicate, small-format works give memories an ethereal, poetic form.

While Amélie Barnathan's drawings continue her journey through the imaginary and neuroses of adolescent girls, her new works take an overtly fantastic turn. The human figure is directly placed in the abyss, against baroque backdrops that open up astonishing dialogues with classical art or certain trends in contemporary popular culture.

Finally, we are pleased and honored to present an exceptional collection of drawings and sketches by one of the most important contemporary artists working at the frontier between contemporary art and comics, Yûichi Yokoyama (born 1967 in Miyazaki, Japan). Since the 1990s, he has been developing a remarkable body of work on the borderline between figuration and abstraction. Exhibited in a number of international institutions, his work is characterized by a sharp line that opens onto dreamlike wanderings where the human and the universe merge. The ubiquitous use of onomatopoeia as graphic signs expands time and space. For Drawing Now, Galerie 8 + 4 is presenting an exceptional collection of sketches and preparatory work for his works.