Markus Vater – Ink Drawings 2020–23

These ink drawings were made by Markus Vater during the long, suspended seasons of the pandemic. Working with ink and pencil on modest A4 sheets, he set himself a daily discipline of drawing storms, sleepers, birds, riders, ghosts and coastlines - images which, as he puts it, “tried to create expanse where there was confinement,” opening pockets of space when the world had narrowed to domestic interiors and news feeds.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1970 and trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Royal College of Art, Vater has built a practice that moves easily between drawing, painting, animation, text and performance. His work has been shown at institutions including Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, the Royal Academy in London and the Franz Gertsch Museum, and sits in public collections across Germany and beyond.

The pandemic drawings sit in continuity with this wider practice but feel unusually stripped back. In Alice, a figure lies half-turned away, caught between vigilance and sleep. In throwing stones into the sublime, a tiny body stands on the lip of an immense gorge, testing scale and gravity. Elsewhere, storms blow in across a coastal strip or through a line of palms, riders move along the tideline, and ghostly forms drift through a scorched wood. The tonal range is narrow, but the spatial reach is vast.

Vater has described drawing as a “rip that tears through our world” – a way of opening reality rather than recording it. In these works that impulse becomes quietly existential. The images are not illustrations of lockdown so much as meditations on fragility, companionship and scale: human figures placed against weather, geology and time. They carry something of Vater’s characteristic philosophical humour and melancholy, but in a condensed, almost cinematic form, like stills from a film that never quite resolves.