Alan Brooks
22 Feb - 30 Mar 2013
ALAN BROOKS
CITY
22 February - 30 March 2013
“This is the city and I am one of the citizens, whatever interests the rest interests me.” (Walt Whitman)
MOTINTERNATIONAL is pleased to present City by Alan Brooks.
Through one hundred drawings which take the city as their subject, Brooks depicts a collective idea of an un-named urban environment. The artist’s photo-litho like reproductions are obsessive in their labour and elaborately detailed: sourced from the internet, reportage and personal photographs, they are placed in proximity to diagrammatic, psycho-geographic and literary fragments. Each drawing operates as an individual pictorial fiction whilst also being a part of a broader, more complex narrative dramatising the ideals and desires of the metropolitan citizen, the architecture and substructures of the urban environment and the socio-political histories that entwine the development of the city space. The artist has taken the early graphic novel The City: A Vision in Woodcuts (1925) by the Belgian engraver Frans Masereel as a point of departure. While Masereel’s book of woodcuts revealed the dangerous, hedonistic vivacity and chaos of a Weimar era city, Brooks’ drawings render a dissonant and sprawling narrative of contemporary space.
CITY
22 February - 30 March 2013
“This is the city and I am one of the citizens, whatever interests the rest interests me.” (Walt Whitman)
MOTINTERNATIONAL is pleased to present City by Alan Brooks.
Through one hundred drawings which take the city as their subject, Brooks depicts a collective idea of an un-named urban environment. The artist’s photo-litho like reproductions are obsessive in their labour and elaborately detailed: sourced from the internet, reportage and personal photographs, they are placed in proximity to diagrammatic, psycho-geographic and literary fragments. Each drawing operates as an individual pictorial fiction whilst also being a part of a broader, more complex narrative dramatising the ideals and desires of the metropolitan citizen, the architecture and substructures of the urban environment and the socio-political histories that entwine the development of the city space. The artist has taken the early graphic novel The City: A Vision in Woodcuts (1925) by the Belgian engraver Frans Masereel as a point of departure. While Masereel’s book of woodcuts revealed the dangerous, hedonistic vivacity and chaos of a Weimar era city, Brooks’ drawings render a dissonant and sprawling narrative of contemporary space.