• Drawing Performance Illustration

    The drawing studio

    «Come in and sit down! Tell me about yourself, I will draw about it on your arm.«

    Action on the scene and video

     

    With pencil, chair, camera and a sympathetic ear, I took up quarters at Frauenpa­villon in St.Gallen’s city park. Spontaneously or after registration, I drew on many arms that joined the ranks of a round of stories in an endless projection on the scene.

     

    Line by line, arm by arm

    St.Gallen artist Lika Nüssli draws for everyone at Frauen­pa­villon

    Frauen­pa­villon is almost empty. There is only a handwritten statement on the dark red walls and three words behind the bar. So where is the exhibition?

    It emerges bit by bit, arm by arm, line by line and wanders off into the city.

    Lika Nüssli enthrals once more with an innovative drawing project. Whether she transforms a room at Hauptpost into a four-dimensional drawing hell – time counts as a dimension – or wakes the ghosts of former overnight guests on walls and ceiling of a hotel room for Kunst­hallen Toggenburg – for Lika Nüssli, a drawing does not stand still, especially not on paper.

    She develops further, oversteps her limits, moves effortlessly between art, comic and illustration, soft-footedly skirts genre-dependent value attributions and categorisations. In the current exhibition, there is a relation to tattoos, but it is still quite different: the skin is carrier of a drawing. Instead of pictures from a catalogue or always the same tribals, one gets an original drawing with Lika Nüssli’s pen, individual, unrepeatable and not watertight.

    The ambience is also special: there is a comfortable chair in Frauen­pa­villon, almost a throne, where the visitors can take a seat and tell the artist a story. From the dialogue and inspired by the visitors’ personal reports, further particles of Lika Nüssli’s drawing cosmos emerge arm by arm. Animals and people bustle about, talk via speech bubbles, let thoughts roam free. No arm is too thin, no skin too old, not a hair too much (hairy men’s arms are also welcome), even moles are incorporated effortlessly into the picture.

    And then the drawing walks out to the city with its carrier. The exhibition wanders, expands, the drawings get a new home. Too bad they will not survive the first shower. The only thing thing to do is to put a bag over it or use deodorant instead of showering. That is the price for a Nüssli original.

    Kristin Schmidt, 19 August 2014 on Saiten online