The Commissioned Drawings Series

Overview

At Sharjah Biennial 9 José Luis Martinat presented two works, City and The Commissioned Drawings Series. The Commissioned Drawings Series is an ongoing collaborative project with Lima’s street Artists, for which Martinat asks each of the Artists to draw two very different portraits. For the first portrait Martinat sits in a conventional seated pose, while for the second portrait he asks the Artist to imagine how they think he may die – Martinat then obliges with the mortal pose and the scene is then drawn by the Artist.

For the Biennial, a series of these ‘double’ portraits were reproduced as slides and presented as pairs in viewing boxes. The dual drawings reflect Martinat’s interest in images as artificial constructions, and in how we experience reality through them.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 9