Mulier Mulier Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of In the Labyrinth, a solo exhibition by Art & Language. The opening will take place on Wednesday, April 23, from 17:00 at Mulier Mulier Gallery Brussels, in the presence of the artist.
The drawings - a new series of twelve large-scale pencil drawings made between 2022 and 2024 by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden - are arranged as three sets of four: views of the studio interior, views looking out from the studio, and views looking back at it from outside. The apparent subject is the Art & Language studio—a familiar place, inhabited daily—yet the images seem curiously out-of-kilter, unsettling, even unheimlich. In October 2024, a second group of drawings was initiated by Michael Baldwin, now working alone. By spring 2025, six new works had been completed. These drawings are all related to or evolving from the earlier ‘studio’ series, though they are also marked by significant differences.
The works from the 'studio' series are not conventionally expressive, nor do they offer an ‘authored’ or singular viewpoint. Each drawing is assembled from four A3-format cotton sheets, covered in printed text, where image and language interfere with one another. The text derives from the Art & Language corpus, but its legibility varies: sometimes obscured by the drawing, sometimes smudged, sometimes surprisingly clear. Rather than pin down meaning, the drawings seem to tease out meanings—plural. They suggest that everything is normal, everything is okay—except that it isn’t. They resist quick readings, and reward slow looking. The second group of drawings by Michael Baldwin forms the principal subject of this Postscript. They can all be plausibly connected with the foregoing 'studio' series, though they are also marked by significant differences from it. They exemplify the perennial Art & Language problematic of ‘going-on’. In doing so they raise problems of the coherence of things like ‘series’, of notions of ‘transition’, of how production evolves, of how, by virtue of ‘going-on' (however broadly or narrowly that may be conceived), one can find oneself in a different place from where one started.
The opening will also mark the presentation of a new publication dedicated to In the Labyrinth.
