Open Form is a collaborative project by visual artist M.Lohrum and dancer and choreographer Calvin Richardson exploring the intersection between dance and performative drawing.

The works (10 paintings and a film) are the culmination of months of preparation and research by these two artists, including time spent together in a studio developing a new way of working, somewhere within the space between mark-making and dance. The paintings are themselves fragments of an enormous area of canvas on which these artists at once both painted and performed, a process which was filmed by director and cinematographer, Ray Moody.

The short film captures the two artists exploring the potential of their bodily gestures as well as the resulting marks in a kind of ‘open form’. The piece investigates perception and the limitations of the body, as well as understanding dance as a form of corporal expression without the need to necessarily create ‘beautiful’ shapes, but rather explore the possibilities of movement. At the same time, drawing here is used as a way to record a trace of these movements, without pretending to represent a pre-defined ‘figure’. The film is accompanied by the song Aeolus, Keeper of the Winds, composed and performed by Quinta. Also exhibited in the gallery were photographs taken by Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine recording M.Lohrum and Calvin Richardson’s collaborative process.

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Please contact Flux Projects Ltd. to enquire about the paintings.

Open Form was comissioned and supported by Flux Projects Ltd.
Exhibition: Proposition Gallery, London.
2023 - 2024.
© M.Lohrum & Calvin Richardson