CHRISTOPHER WINTER
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The Drawings of Christopher Winter
Over the last ten years Winter has been producing detailed pencil drawings of a delicate but subversive universe, taking as his inspiration the drawings of Dante’s Inferno by Sando Botticelli (1444‐1510). Botticelli produced an extraordinarily ambitious and original project of which 92 drawings survive. The works were intended during Botticelli’s time to be printed in a book of the Divine Comedy. The drawings were very large and horizontal in format and in a way totally unsuitable for the printing press. Winter found the restrained sparse contemporary feel of the line drawings irresistible and embarked on his own series of cosmological works. The drawings begin as doodles that function like microcosms matching our universe. Drawing is the closest connection between mind and image. The pictorial content has a fairy tale framework of flying figures and flowers. What appears at first glance to be quite innocent can reveal below the surface details of devastation, storms and sexual acts. The flowers form themselves into ghoulish faces that haunt the viewer. This is far from the ideal world and is much closer to our contemporary experience. |
