Rosebud Contemporary is proud to present Vision of the Invisible, an exhibition of drawings by eight artists, Don Doe, Chandru G, Chris Bors, Nitin Mukul, Stan Narten, Natesh M, RJ Calabrese, and Ebenezer Singh, opening on February 22, 2024, at their Chelsea location: 526 W 26th St #606 New York, NY. Each artist has contributed three of their most visionary drawings towards the show. A drawing is a vision, a memory, a sign, a scribble, an instantaneous reaction using a simple tool on any available surface. Drawings are inscriptions, visible signs of the invisible. A drawing is a ‘no-drama’ acted out in person. While a painting may be an activity initiated by a milieu or a societal structure, a drawing dawns from within the artist, only to be realized using simple tools. One of Joseph Beuys’s pencil drawings opens a world of inquiries, and one of Willem de Kooning’s drawings can be erased entirely by Robert Rauschenberg and still be a ‘no-drawing’ drawing.

Drawing has even been a tool for poets and composers. From William Blake to Kahlil Gibran, Arnold Schoenberg to John Cage, drawings take on intricate meanings in the minds of these creative practitioners of other mediums. Rosebud Contemporary, in its pursuit of digging deep into the minds of our contemporary artists, is re-establishing the fact that the drawings do matter. They matter not because they can become a painting in an artist’s studio, but also because they exist on their own as the artist’s immediate vision.

Jacques Derrida, from whose words the title of the exhibition ‘Vision of the Invisible’ is derived, speaks of one of the Rembrandt’s drawings in his work ‘Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait, and Other Ruins’: ‘The memory of the event must be inscribed. The debt must be repaid with words on parchment, which is to say, with visible signs of the invisible…. What guides the graphic point, the quill, pencil, or scalpel is the respectful observance of a commandment, the acknowledgement before knowledge, the gratitude of the receiving before seeing, the blessing before the knowing’.