The Gallery Adler exhibition "Walk the Line" presents a sample of drawings and water colors by artists from the New York art scene.
 
Michael Schall (*1977) builds a synthetic universe of his own, with bleak landscapes and vast rock-like formations, in which pockets of ambiguously functional industrial structures are embedded. His interest revolves around the interaction between the necessary and the discretionary. In his drawings, he proposes an environment in which exploration, be it visual, physical, or intellectual, is prioritized. It is through the investigation of his meticulously and intuitively rendered imagined worlds that meaning can be created by means of associations with our own society’s desire to dominate and control both its environment and its individuals.
 
Rachel Howe and Michael Scoggins, in contrast, confront us with the symbols and icons of subculture, revolution and violence.
 
Rachel Howe (*1979) looks at how interior sadness is transmuted into anger and aggression. She is starting out with long thinking processes, the drawings themselves then are spontaneous outbursts, the artist being mindful of preserving the physical presence of this spontaneity. The multiplicity of body fragments and the addition of weapons in the hands, work to be overpowering gestures; however, individual features, specific locations and contexts are omitted.
 
Michael Scoggins (*1973) deals with the forces which let children loose their innocence and asks why we do not „grow up“ as we get older and our behaviour stays similar. We just become more efficient, more cunning, more brutal. He uses monumental sheets of hand-drawn notebook paper. Their spiral bound edges and their blue lines have become the signature image for the artist. He fills the sheets with doodles, comic book characters, angry rants and even long texts. His works are filled with criticisms of society and point at the increasing nationalism in the face of globalization.

Andrew Guenther (*1976) finally, according to his own statement, „makes negative things look pretty“ and lets the viewers decide whether they would like to participate or not. His works are full of death metal, zombie carcasses, satyrs, hippie kitsch, goats, owls and the notion of the grotesque. Guenther’s cosmology evokes the work of Hieronymus Bosch. Yet his concerns resonate with contemporary society’s ongoing fascination with the gruesome and the bizarre, the tragic and the comic, at least as reflected in films and on TV.
 
 

Andrew Guenther
*1976 Wheaton, IL, USA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

2000 MFA Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New
        Brunswick, NJ
1998 BA Lawrence University, Appleton, WI
1996 Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Rome, Italy