What makes a good drawing? Māris Bišofs
Irēna Bužinska
In writing this article on artist Māris Bišofs, I had to reconsider the stable position occupied by simple, laconic drawing in contemporary art, now in the 21st century. Should contemporary drawing (and the artist) be viewed essentially as an isolated concept, or as a typical and essential element of some wider whole? Is the artist - "the draughtsman" really endowed with something divine and unique - as I have read in several reviews of the solo exhibition by Māris Bišofs? If "Bišofs' View" is indeed endowed with such properties, then what conditions have promoted the development of this phenomenon? However, in the case of Māris Bišofs, traditional theoretical conclusions and generalisations "don't apply", because his ironic drawing, full of paradox and absurdity, is not constructed or created according to the classical principles of shaded drawing. Many seemingly remote and superficially unrelated factors may be mentioned as preconditions for the emergence of this phenomenon. This is revealed, for example, by certain facts from the artist's life, such as his schooling at the Woodcarving Department of the Riga Secondary School of Applied Art (1954-1959) and studies in the Interior Design Department of the Latvian Academy of Art (1959-1965). Bišofs' fellow-students included Maija Tabaka, Imants Lancmanis, Bruno Vasiļevskis, Andris Freibergs and Malda Muižule. The space of his life extended from Latvia, where he spent his early years, to include Moscow (1966-1972), Israel (1972-1980), Paris (1981-1983) and New York (1984-2003). Since autumn 2003, Māris Bišofs is once again living in Riga. The forty years of the artist's life outlined above might be described as a precise trajectory, very favourably arranged by fate. We touched on various essential aspects of drawing, or "what makes a good drawing", in our conversation on 25 January 2005, at the artist's studio apartment on Pērnavas iela in Riga.
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