March 06 – 07, 2024, 10 am – 12:30 pm
Many thanks to the artist Anja Tchepets for her workshop EXPERIMENTAL DRAWING: Written Artworks during the basic course within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.
“Over the last two decades text has obtained an ever greater presence in our lives. Emails, text messages, tweeting, social media, letters, words and sentences, unfolding in front of our eyes with dazzling speed.
Yet text does not only serve as a source of information. Text and visual art have been intertwined for centuries – early examples are to be seen in cave paintings and medieval illuminated manuscripts. Since the last century text became one of the central elements and important tools for art creation used by numerous international and contemporary artists as a dominant in their artworks.
We will start this course by looking at some examples from art history and then examine different usages of text in art: as determination of materiality, as expression of ideas and concepts, as a decorative and as a perfomative element.
In this course we will experiment with the shapes of individual letters and with the composition of words. Through various exercises and group discussions, we will explore different approaches and artistic methods of integrating text into our own artworks. The aim of the course is to learn how multifaceted and differentiated language and writing are used as artistic material today and how to apply those methods in own artistic practice.” (Text by courtesy of Anja Tchepets)
Day 1
10 am – 10.20 am
Prasentation of lecture on some examples from art history of different usages of text in art.
10.20 am – 11.00 am
We will start experimenting with letters using stencils and transferring them into abstract shapes by repeating and overlapping, applying different textures and constructing our own compositions.
11.00 am – 11.30 am
An exercise “Repetitous Message”
11.30 am – 12.15 pm
We will be creating our own compositions using type and adding other elements such as collage or hand drawn images.
12:15 pm – 12:30 pm
At end of the first day we will look at the results of our experiments and discuss them in a group.
Day 2
10 am – 10.30 am
An exercise “Unwords”
10:30 am – 11:15 am
An exercise “Hidden Messages”
11:15 am – 11:45 am
An exercise “Performing Text”
11.45 am – 12.30 pm
Installation of group exhibition and group discussion of work that was produced.
Anja Tchepets (born in Leningrad, 1970) studied art in Russia (Leningrad), Canada (Montreal) and Germany (Berlin). After a decade spent working as an artist and illustrator in New York she made Berlin her base. She works in the visual areas of painting, drawing, printing, artist books, illustration, film and animation, more lately having been involved in projects combining life drawing with projection. Anja Tchepets exhibits regularly and has done numerous artist residencies in Germany and internationally including England, Belgium, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Sweden and Russia.
