Drawings by Ingo Giezendanner
In Zürich there is a calm kitchen, in which all food containers are stripped of their labels, and in the kitchen there is a table with two wooden chairs. At one of these chairs sits artist Ingo Giezendanner (pen-and-ink name GRRRR) with his treasure tin of colored pencils within reach—every tip sharp. Natural light slants over his shoulder onto the table’s checkerboard pattern, which could be described as blue-and-white, although the blue shifts over the course of a day from cobalt to Prussian to cyan and turquoise and back again and the white has creamed over time.
At this table, throughout the boxed-in years of 2020 and 2021, Ingo established a ritual of drawing the objects in front of him at a given moment. The result is Kitchen, a pocket-sized (9×13.2 cm) compendium of 49 colored-pencil drawings. His tabletop tableaux document a nutritious and delicious spread of fruits (eternally unpeeling orange), spices, herbs, and bottled vitamins; a ring of latent power and a rainbow bead bracelet; a needle and thread, their purpose touchingly unspecified; and impromptu vanitas in the form of a coffee-filter-holder doing double duty as a compost bin, a candle approaching guttering, and ever so many pencil shavings.
Kitchen includes a painting by Maria Pomiansky of the slippered, tousled artist at work drawing a red cabbage; and a poem by Stefan Lorenzutti about his fateful decision to open a bottle of wine with a woodworking tool.