About "The Drawing Collective"

It all began one evening in Paris a couple of years ago. I had met up with some friends at the Centre de Pompidou to see a Drawing exposition. It was a beautiful display of a large collection of contemporary drawings from the Guerlain Foundation.

At the end of our visit we talked about the show and its contents. We observed the evolved definition of drawings in the context of contemporary art and the phenomenon of drawing as an end result versus drawing as a process to arrive at a goal. The application of different tools and substrates intrigued us. We realized that drawing played an important role in our own studio practices. We thought it would be interesting to explore this subject with other artists we knew.

Our connections through social media with artists across the globe enabled us to launch this effort to connect with them to explore together the practice of drawing. The Drawing Collective is the visual format of this exploration. We are very lucky to be able to form a great collective of talented artists. It has been a wonderful journey for me to see this effort evolve from an idea to a concrete group of enthusiastic participants.

Our challenge was to keep it limited to a number that would allow meaningful communication and realistic possibilities for showing our collective work. It was not easy. Sadly we could not include many talented and enthusiastic artists for this initial effort.

Munira Naqui
Founder of "The Drawing Collective"