Statement:

A Century of Charcoal brings together works by over 30 artists made over the past 100 years. On view in a specially designed gallery on Vortic.art, with selected highlight works at Victoria Miro, London and Venice.///

Charcoal is elemental. Born from fire, charcoal is made from wood (especially twigs of willow or vine) that has been heated to a high temperature in a low-oxygen environment (a process called pyrolysis).

Its history as a medium is as old as human mark-making itself: the earliest artists, crouched in caves, dragged charred sticks across stone to summon animals and ancestors from the walls.

Artists have always prized charcoal for its ability to create soft, dark, velvety marks and subtle shading. Its crumbly nature makes it easily smudged but also easily erased.

Drawing with charcoal also involves selectively removing it, creating highlights that allow the white paper to show through. This interplay between light and dark is one of the medium’s most distinctive features, known as chiaroscuro, an Italian word meaning literally ‘light-dark.’

The charcoal drawings presented in this exhibition date from the last 100 years and range from preparatory sketches to fully realised, monumental works.