International Paper Drawings by Emerging Artists Catalogue
UCLA HAMMER Museum 2003
By Claudine Isé
Moving fluidly between the realms of figuration and abstraction, often within a single drawing, Nina Lola Bachhuber attempts to describe the shifting inner landscape of human consciousness. Bachhuber has described the human body as “ a kind of lodging”, which under certain conditions may assume the imprisoning qualities of a cage. Her ink and pencil drawings explore these and other metaphors of the corpus (often an explicitly female one) through recurring imagery that includes helmets, receptacles, architectural fragments, and blood-red biomorphic forms.
Bachhuber often works in series, typically selecting one or two colors, such as red or black, and working solely within that chromatic framework. Once combined, the individual drawings take on the rhythmic qualities akin to a musical phrase. The addition of a drawing can change the meaning of all the others and may also alter the way one reads the entire series.
Bachhuber’s lyrical use of the line tends to favor the expressive over the representational. Indeed, in her drawings the line becomes a kind of thread that leads both to and from the artist’s subconscious. “Drawing is somehow a process of finding”, she has noted. “When I set out I hardly know hat I am going to draw. Rather, the drawing is looking at me and I sometimes don’t know its name.
