Aim of the Competition

The competition is a review of the drawing in the recent years, aimed at the broadest perspective of creative attitudes and tendencies, the best achievements and experiments in this field.

For everybody interested: is reanimation of the notion “academic drawing” possible? What is ACADEMIC DRAWING?

Usually we associate this notion with a conservative work, conventional in its form, lacking invention, whose only, sometimes doubtful, value depends on workshop correctness. These features of academic drawing are rooted in the 19th century drawings that were made at the artistic academies of the time. Their character was determined by a “decorum” category, which was actively promoted by the academies and required that the artists would present noble contents in appropriate form, following the examples of ancient and Italian Renaissance art. Its rules could be learnt only by way of arduous training of eye and hand, of painstakingly copying the works of old masters – a method which is thought to stifle spontaneity and creative originality.

Thus ACADEMIC DRAWING was searching for perfection, both in the sphere of formal and compositional solutions and in the quality of expression and contents. It was therefore academic drawing, but academic in the positive meaning of the word, as it meant activities focused on looking for the truth and the ideal. It was the art of explicitly intellectual character, aimed at a well-educated and aesthetically sensitive viewer.

• Is there room for this sort of ACADEMIC DRAWING in contemporary art?
• Does freedom from the compulsion to illustrate have to, paradoxically, mean domination of purely visual activities in art, characterised by aggressive vividness?
• Is it not possible to try to revive the link between workshop skilfulness and the intellectual element in the new definition of ACADEMIC DRAWING?
• Is there no room for academic experiments of form now, in the times focused on functionality?
• Can we still do ACADEMIC DRAWING?
  And what is it supposed to be?

We intend to find answers to these questions in the third edition of the International Competition of Drawing Wrocław 2006.

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