Gosebruch’s untitled contribution to the show is a medium-sized work on paper, what looks like it could be some form of still life, an abstracted depiction of two flowers. It’s almost like a shadow, the forms in a hazy sort of sepia-tinted brown. A few quick twirls of pencil line underscore the floral swirls at the head of the stalks, and it looks like it could almost be the sketch towards a painting, a preparation for a more detailed canvas work. But the paper is stained with oil, giving it a slight transparency and also smudging the pigment, making the paper more present and giving the work its own spread and feel that couldn’t be achieved on another format. A quick gesture, then, becomes laden and slowed to the point of being still on paper. In the Jerwood show, this piece stands out as a particular approach, adding a painterly weight to the use of drawing as a momentary and felt hand movement.
Gosebruch’s practice goes between these light, expressive drawings with pencil, ink and oil, to sculptures made with extruded lines of clay, what he considers drawings in 3D.
In the drawings, the calmness belies the tension of the layered moments between the media, separate but almost simultaneous gestures that dance around each other. The hard pencil lines have their own hard edges that cut and contrast with the coloured stains. Gosebruch trained as a painter, and previous drawings used stencils to guide pastels on the paper. His sculptures echo those stencils, pushed now into the real world as rough ceramic jigsaws, at points looking like a deconstructed cello or morphed animal shape.
Like his drawings, there is a haunted sense to the forms, hovering somewhere between figuration and abstraction, between “control, the desperate lack of it, or degrees of freedom from it.”
