Andrew McQualterNovember Compositions

Drawing is generally considered a two-dimensional medium but McQualter considers his work to be spatial. His drawings occupy whole rooms, and those on opposite or adjacent walls echo and respond to one another in open-ended and enigmatic ways. As in various pre-modern forms of narrative painting like traditional Chinese landscapes or Persian miniatures, space withinMcQualter’s wall drawings is organised according to a conceptual or symbolic logic and linear time seems disrupted. McQualter’s repertoire of images is sometimes extended into three-dimensions. A drawn object in one installation—a chair, rock, or tree—becomes an actual object in another.

In November Compositions, McQualter extends these ideas, taking particular inspiration from the metaphysical spaces of early Renaissance frescoes, the spatially ambiguous wall drawings of cubes by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings on language and meaning in his Philosophical Investigations (1953).

Publication