Drawings by Gerbrand Burger and Tarja Szaraniec. Both artists take observations from everyday life and place them into a specific new context; a world that only exists on the paper.

Gerbrand Burger resides in Amsterdam and began his work on an ongoing series of small drawings on standard printing paper in 2003/2004, during a yearlong stay in New York. Each drawing is a tiny element of the bigger whole of the series, which is growing to become a universe of its own. Gerbrand Burger sees the collection of inventions and observations as a “taxonocyclopology” (a homemade contraction of taxonomy, encyclopaedia and topology) that describes, like an exploded view does, the parts of the complex machinery of an imagined world. The drawings function as a strange lexicon that refers to the unknown but still has an apparent internal logic, while allowing the viewer his or her own associations and connections.

In this show Tarja Szaraniec presents a selection of large as well as small drawings. The larger drawings frequently show the collision between hard and soft elements. Hard structures like iron fences rise up from the soil as do the wooden constructions and brick walls while soft, fanciful and capricious plants like ivy find their way around them. Upon closer examination, there appears to be something strange going on with these seemingly simple and everyday elements. For example, one of the iron fences seems to be infected by the forms of the ivy. Once the eye begins to follow the form of this fence, it gets lost. The logic that makes any fence a fence is absent here. The iron wires start to lead their own life, almost in the mode of the ivy itself.