Slawomir Elsner

(*1976 in Wodzislav Slaski, Poland, lives and works in Berlin) focuses in his practice recently on works on paper, watercolours and crayon drawings. Elsner works in series. In large crayon drawings in the series Window on the World, he stretched the genre of drawing. In his most recent drawings he explores the colours and compositions of famous Old Master paintings. Instead of using the “classical” line drawing, defining the volume of space through singular lines, Elsner circumscribes the pictorial space with hundreds of straight line bundles. His works possess a contradictory quality that can be described as a sharpened blur. Beside these meticulous crayon drawings Elsner creates engulfing watercolours. In different sizes, sometimes depicting star constellations, sometimes alluding to airy curtains. The crayon works as well as the watercolors from the different series hold an apparent contradiction: Through their artisanal fabrication the personal style of the artist is not pronounced, on the contrary through the careful even application of watercolour and the repeated fixing of lines Slawomir Elsner nearly negates personal style, his “hand”. Accurately the curator Michael Hering characterized another feature of Slawomir Elsner’s crayon drawings after famous paintings from art history: “The most accurate precision in drawing achieves formally the most evident blurring.” It seems as the images would be behind translucent glass and the contours would blur even the sharp lines are drawn with outmost precision.

Elsner’s work is in the following public collections Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, (Charlotte, North Carolina, USA); KiCo Foundation permanent loan for the Lenbachhaus, Munich; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Important public collection and foundations hold his work amongst others XXL Collection of the German Stock Market, Frankfurt on the Main; Cusanuswerk, Bischöfliche Studienförderung Bonn; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Collection of the LBBW, Stuttgart; Ostsächsiche Sparkasse, Dresden; me Collectors Room, Berlin; Roche Art Collection, Basel

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Selected works