Alan Michael, Alexandra Bircken, Anna Clegg, Calvin Marcus, Eric N. Mack, François Durel, Graham Wiebe, Hamish Pearch, Hilary Lloyd, Jan Vorisek, Jasmine Gregory, Jef Geys, Josef Strau, Joel Wycherley, Justin Chance, Kayode Ojo, Kembra Pfahler, Michael Dean, Michel Majerus, Oscar Enberg, Patricia L. Boyd, Rafik Greiss, Remi Ajani, Ser Serpas, Stuart Middleton, Tiago Francez, Tobias Spichtig, Tom Burr and Win McCarthy
Works on Paper
20.02.26 - 12.03.26
Conor Ackhurst, William S. Burroughs, Jill Mulleady, David Ostrowski and Tobias Spichtig
Museum Department is pleased to present Works on Paper, a group exhibition bringing together Conor Ackhurst, William S. Burroughs, Jill Mulleady, David Ostrowski, Ser Serpas and Tobias Spichtig. The exhibition considers the page not as a preparatory surface or secondary support, but as a site where meaning is negotiated, deferred, and redistributed. Across drawing, collage, text and image, the works foreground fragility, reproducibility, and incompletion as structural conditions rather than stylistic choices. Paper here carries residue, revision, and interruption, registering compression, repetition, and the pressures of contemporary production. Rather than proposing a unified theme or narrative, the exhibition assembles practices that treat the page as an active interface, one that exposes process, resists closure, and holds thought without resolving it.
Untitled, 2025
Charcoal on paper
42 x 30 cm
for all enquiries email info@sotf-commodity.com
Paper has never been neutral, though it is often treated that way. As a material, it creases, absorbs, bleeds, folds. It registers decisions as they happen and holds their residue, whether or not those gestures were meant to last. Paper is not just surface. It is shaped by infrastructure. It reflects the logistical and institutional conditions that underpin artistic production: technique, distribution, repetition, erasure.
The page has historically occupied a peripheral position. Sketches, drafts, notes, and instructions were not considered works in themselves but useful byproducts of something else, something more stable, more singular, more permanent. This marginality is not just a matter of oversight. It reflects a hierarchy of value that favours objects that resist duplication and imply authorship. Paper resists both. It is reproducible, fragile, and often unsigned. But these same qualities allow it to behave differently. The page does not merely support a work. It circulates, accumulates, and interfaces. It does not just hold meaning. It distributes it.
Works on Paper begins with this contradiction. The exhibition does not propose a theme or formal thread. It is not organised by medium in any traditional sense. Instead, it gathers works that approach the page as a zone of active negotiation. These practices are structurally shaped by incompletion, fragmentation, and exposure. These are not aesthetic preferences. They are responses to the conditions under which contemporary work is made. Compression, repetition and infrastructural fatigue all leave visible marks.
There is precedent for this reconfiguration of the page. In the early twentieth century, Dada artists dismantled the idea of visual unity through collage, photomontage, and typographic rupture. The page no longer served to hold content. It fractured it. Meaning arrived in fragments, contradictions, and dissonant overlays. But Dada’s strategies were not without ambiguity. The violence of disruption could just as easily become a form of spectacle. The question remains whether these tactics escaped the systems they sought to critique or simply mirrored them under a new name.
In the postwar period, Joseph Beuys approached the page as a site of transmission rather than depiction. His drawings, instructions, scores, and diagrams were not preliminary studies. They were propositions. Beuys used materials such as graphite, rust, fat, blood, and felt not only for their symbolism but for their reactivity. These were materials that absorbed temperature, carried energy, and decayed over time. The page became thermal, affective, and charged. But it also became opaque. Beuys cultivated a mythology around his work that relied on intuition and belief as much as on legibility. His use of the page was expansive, but it also reinforced the authority of the artist as figurehead and transmitter. The tension between access and opacity remains.
This friction continues in Works on Paper. The page here is not treated as stable ground. It reflects its own conditions. It shows what it can hold and what it resists. It carries decisions without smoothing them. Revision becomes visible. Erasure leaves residue. Paper does not allow for unlimited reworking. It records what happens, often before it can be planned or polished.
Many of the works in the exhibition incorporate language, but not to clarify. Text appears as citation, as score, as interruption, as debris. It operates alongside image rather than explaining it. The relationship between the two is neither fixed nor stable. Language can guide, obstruct, or fail. Meaning is present, but it remains contingent. It may be deferred, revised, or withheld entirely.
The fragment recurs throughout the exhibition. Not as a romantic gesture, but as a pragmatic form. In a saturated and discontinuous present, the fragment is often what remains. It can be stored, repeated, recombined, or left open. But fragmentation is not inherently resistant. It is also the logic of platforms, timelines, and productivity tools. The question is not whether the fragment is useful, but how it operates. Whether it suspends meaning or accelerates its circulation. Whether it opens space or simply reflects its collapse.
The exhibition avoids narrative. It does not follow a curatorial arc. Works are placed in adjacency, not sequence. The structure is relational rather than thematic. Proximity takes the place of coherence. There is repetition without accumulation. There is structure without resolution. The field that emerges is not unified. It is provisional, held together by shared material pressures rather than shared aesthetic language.
This is not a stylistic position. It is a structural one. The persistence of the page reflects larger shifts in how artists work. In the 1960s and 70s, conceptual practices redefined the page as both artwork and document. It could function as instruction, as trace, as event. That model allowed for new forms of production and distribution, but it also introduced new exclusions. Legibility became a form of access. So did education. Not everyone was invited to read the page on its own terms.
Today, those structures persist. They have been reshaped by digital saturation, institutional fatigue, and economic instability. The page remains, not as a nostalgic return, but as a response to scarcity. It does not demand scale or polish. It allows for immediacy and hesitation. It reflects limits. It registers contradiction. It holds thought without requiring its resolution.
And so this is not a conclusion. Nothing concludes. The page is not a resolution. It is a pause. It is not a rediscovery. It is what has always been used when there was nothing else to use. These works are not unfinished in the way we sometimes say that with admiration. Some of them are simply not finished. Some are not going to be. That is the condition. It is not tragic. It is not profound. It is what is available.
The page has historically occupied a peripheral position. Sketches, drafts, notes, and instructions were not considered works in themselves but useful byproducts of something else, something more stable, more singular, more permanent. This marginality is not just a matter of oversight. It reflects a hierarchy of value that favours objects that resist duplication and imply authorship. Paper resists both. It is reproducible, fragile, and often unsigned. But these same qualities allow it to behave differently. The page does not merely support a work. It circulates, accumulates, and interfaces. It does not just hold meaning. It distributes it.
Works on Paper begins with this contradiction. The exhibition does not propose a theme or formal thread. It is not organised by medium in any traditional sense. Instead, it gathers works that approach the page as a zone of active negotiation. These practices are structurally shaped by incompletion, fragmentation, and exposure. These are not aesthetic preferences. They are responses to the conditions under which contemporary work is made. Compression, repetition and infrastructural fatigue all leave visible marks.
There is precedent for this reconfiguration of the page. In the early twentieth century, Dada artists dismantled the idea of visual unity through collage, photomontage, and typographic rupture. The page no longer served to hold content. It fractured it. Meaning arrived in fragments, contradictions, and dissonant overlays. But Dada’s strategies were not without ambiguity. The violence of disruption could just as easily become a form of spectacle. The question remains whether these tactics escaped the systems they sought to critique or simply mirrored them under a new name.
In the postwar period, Joseph Beuys approached the page as a site of transmission rather than depiction. His drawings, instructions, scores, and diagrams were not preliminary studies. They were propositions. Beuys used materials such as graphite, rust, fat, blood, and felt not only for their symbolism but for their reactivity. These were materials that absorbed temperature, carried energy, and decayed over time. The page became thermal, affective, and charged. But it also became opaque. Beuys cultivated a mythology around his work that relied on intuition and belief as much as on legibility. His use of the page was expansive, but it also reinforced the authority of the artist as figurehead and transmitter. The tension between access and opacity remains.
This friction continues in Works on Paper. The page here is not treated as stable ground. It reflects its own conditions. It shows what it can hold and what it resists. It carries decisions without smoothing them. Revision becomes visible. Erasure leaves residue. Paper does not allow for unlimited reworking. It records what happens, often before it can be planned or polished.
Many of the works in the exhibition incorporate language, but not to clarify. Text appears as citation, as score, as interruption, as debris. It operates alongside image rather than explaining it. The relationship between the two is neither fixed nor stable. Language can guide, obstruct, or fail. Meaning is present, but it remains contingent. It may be deferred, revised, or withheld entirely.
The fragment recurs throughout the exhibition. Not as a romantic gesture, but as a pragmatic form. In a saturated and discontinuous present, the fragment is often what remains. It can be stored, repeated, recombined, or left open. But fragmentation is not inherently resistant. It is also the logic of platforms, timelines, and productivity tools. The question is not whether the fragment is useful, but how it operates. Whether it suspends meaning or accelerates its circulation. Whether it opens space or simply reflects its collapse.
The exhibition avoids narrative. It does not follow a curatorial arc. Works are placed in adjacency, not sequence. The structure is relational rather than thematic. Proximity takes the place of coherence. There is repetition without accumulation. There is structure without resolution. The field that emerges is not unified. It is provisional, held together by shared material pressures rather than shared aesthetic language.
This is not a stylistic position. It is a structural one. The persistence of the page reflects larger shifts in how artists work. In the 1960s and 70s, conceptual practices redefined the page as both artwork and document. It could function as instruction, as trace, as event. That model allowed for new forms of production and distribution, but it also introduced new exclusions. Legibility became a form of access. So did education. Not everyone was invited to read the page on its own terms.
Today, those structures persist. They have been reshaped by digital saturation, institutional fatigue, and economic instability. The page remains, not as a nostalgic return, but as a response to scarcity. It does not demand scale or polish. It allows for immediacy and hesitation. It reflects limits. It registers contradiction. It holds thought without requiring its resolution.
And so this is not a conclusion. Nothing concludes. The page is not a resolution. It is a pause. It is not a rediscovery. It is what has always been used when there was nothing else to use. These works are not unfinished in the way we sometimes say that with admiration. Some of them are simply not finished. Some are not going to be. That is the condition. It is not tragic. It is not profound. It is what is available.
Works
Untitled, 2025
Charcoal on paper
42 x 30 cm
enquire
Untitled, 2025
Charcoal on paper
42 x 30 cm
enquire
Untitled, 2025
Charcoal on paper
42 x 30 cm
enquire
Untitled, 2025
Charcoal on paper
42 x 30 cm
enquire
Untitled, 2025
Charcoal on paper
42 x 30 cm
enquire
Untitled, 2025
Charcoal on paper
42 x 30 cm
enquire