This exhibition is a high-calibre accrochage of drawings by ten important American painters and sculptors after 1950. On the occasion of Fred Jahn’s 80th birthday, it is intended to highlight one of the focal points of his decades of gallery activity and, not least, to recall exhibitions that had a lasting impact on the public and inspired numerous collectors. To this day, Fred Jahn has a special love for the genre of drawing, which tends to conceal its secrets in the mostly intimate scale of the hand. Tracking them down and communicating them with enthusiasm has always been one of his central concerns.

Among the artists represented here are Andy Warhol and Fred Sandback, with whom Jahn had already been involved in his early days as an employee of Heiner Friedrich’s gallery since 1969. It was there that he first met Sandback in person and curated an exhibition that was to be followed by numerous others in his own gallery from 1978 onwards. The sensual potential of this artist’s  terse spatial surveys, in which he discovered the drawing surface as an autonomous space and enabled the line to unfold in undreamt-of dimensions, has fascinated the gallery owner from the very beginning. Works on paper by Andy Warhol and Paul Thek were always present in the gallery, even if they were not part of the core program over the years.

Willem de Kooning, born in 1904, is the nestor among the artists gathered in this show. He was followed by Richard Artschwager and James Bishop, the lyricist among the American painters, who were twenty years younger. No contrast could be more diametrically opposed than that between de Kooning’s feverishly expressive linear style and Bishop’s atmospheric sfumato, that silent, meditative absorption that lends his paper miniatures their incomparably complex pictorial versatility. Alongside Artschwager, who called himself “not just a hidden, but an obvious Romantic” [1] and characterized drawing as “serving both the everyday and the transcendental”. [2]

Among the artists Fred Jahn has repeatedly shown since the 1980s is Carroll Dunham. His hybrid arsenal of forms, constantly alluding to nature, to the mutation of the organic - repeatedly also sexually - seems to be in a perpetual process of transformation. For Terry Winters, who is the same age, the organic, the biomorphic interweaving also plays a formative role: the creative as a projection of the vital growth process of nature. Winters is able to translate his speculative imagination into strictly networked organisms, revealing a pronounced sense of structure, pattern and system. His works are characterized throughout by an imaginary spatiality, which the artist describes as the primary source of energy.

This does not apply to the same extent to the sculptor Barry Le Va, whose thinking as a draughtsman is more likely to be characterized as diagrammatic. Le Va had found a kind of second artistic home in Munich during the nineties of the last century. His close collaboration with Fred Jahn resulted in artistically significant drawing and printmaking projects during this time. The close combination of mathematics and sensuality, of calculation and emotion, makes Le Va’s works on paper unique in the panorama of American drawing of his generation. Jahn’s unrelenting advocacy of his art has decisively promoted its high International esteem among museums and collectors.

Finally, Al Taylor, who died far too young: in addition to his three-dimensional works, he created a wealth of drawings, which Fred Jahn has shown in many exhibitions since the nineties. Taylor’s artistic delight is usually sparked by the observation of banal objects or curious situations. He has repeatedly turned the most trivial of occasions into a vehicle for extreme “serious“ investigations. Breaking the rules and transgressions helped him to experience something that he had not expected. The moments of time and chance played a formative role in Taylor’s conception, transitory, self-generating processes that included the manipulation and mobility of different aggregate states. Taylor loved the subversive, the subliminally ironic refraction, that special mixture of seriousness and lightness. Hardly any other illustrator from his circle - with the possible exception of William Copley - can amuse the viewer in a comparable way.

Michael Semff