Marek Tobolewski - Line
BEAM, Nottingham
15 September–22 October 2022
Exhibition Launch Party:
Saturday 17 September 6–10pm
All welcome, no booking required
Foraged fruit beers and natural wine
Food from Small Food Bakery
Beam is delighted to present a new exhibition by Marek Tobolewski, which includes recent paintings, drawings and prints. An exceptional painter of his generation, Tobolewski has explored the formalities of abstract painting for nearly 40 years, in particular one of the building blocks of image making, the line.
Lines are a fundamental part of both the natural and constructed world. Every leaf, tree, building and body contains lines. Every human is a network of nerves and veins, every building, town and street is constructed from the lines determined by the architects and builders that create the DNA of the constructed world. Trees grow slowly to produce a complex network of branches, twigs and leaves that create a network of complex lines, like no other.
The artist’s work since the early 2000s has explored the fundamental nature of the line, creating a delicate, mesmerising body of work that is painstakingly executed in a range of media including oil painting, ink and graphite drawings. Tobolewski’s lines are not referential of anything in the built or natural world but are the result of the artists relentless experiments.
Tobolewski’s exploration of the line can exist in a singular graphite line, sometimes in symmetrical forms, sometimes in more free-form arrangements. Lines can cross, interweave and overlay, some illuminated with colour, others remaining as negative space or single sparse pencil lines. On occasion, the line becomes a wash of paint and ink to become an ethereal form that floats on the surface of the canvas or paper.
Colour plays a crucial role in the work too, subtly shifting in tone and texture, sometimes defining the negative space for the line, sometimes a ground or an equal plane. Impossible to fully appreciate in photographic form, paintings often appear like prints and vice versa.
Each work is part of the artist’s endless experimentation and self-imposed rules that lead to these highly crafted works, each slowly evolving from one piece to another. In a world that is short on attention span, the making and viewing of this work demands the opposite.
These extraordinary lines are both maps and marks of an artistic journey that can only be realised through an exceptional presence of mind and hand of the artist working in unison.
Marek Tobolewski was born in 1964 in Bishop Stortford, England. He graduated from Brighton College of Art in 1986 with a BA in Fine Art Painting. He lives & works in Nottingham, with a studio based at Primary. He was the recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award in 1989 and exhibits nationally and internationally.
