At first sight, Towner Eastbourne’s latest show makes for grim viewing. Drawing the Unspeakable, running to April 27, brings together about 300 drawings laced with images of sickness, death, rape, torture and the fears, dangers and anguish of wars and migrations. Here are distillations of grief and loss, memories and nightmares. Yet what emerges from this is strangely uplifting, raised by the images’ strength and humanity and the courage they honour.
“There is violence, darkness and grief in these drawings, but there is also the unspeakable love,” says artist Liza Dimbleby, co-curator of the show with her father David, doyen of British TV presenters and chairman of the charitable trust that runs the gallery.
The idea for the show emerged from an exchange of letters between father and daughter during the COVID lockdown. Navigating the traumas of the pandemic and forced isolation, they found they could communicate things to one another through sketches that they couldn’t easily put into words.
“With an image, you can say three things at once,” Liza says in a dialogue with her father that forms part of the show: “An image can hold ambivalence.”
“Drawing is more complex than the idea expressed in words,” adds David Dimbleby. “You couldn’t write a paragraph summarising all your emotions from looking at a drawing because it’s layered. It has different stories in it, different implications.”
This density of ideas and emotions is mirrored in the show itself. In a relatively small space, it spans a chronological range from the early 19th-century caricaturist James Gillray to the contemporary interdisciplinary artist Kara Walker and a geographical spread taking in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
Nearly 100 artists include the internationally renowned, the unjustly neglected and the accidental witnesses. Bomberg and Frink, Bourgeois and Burra, Hepworth and Hockney, Kossoff, Lowry, Revilious, and Rego are just a sampling of the riches on offer, cheek by jowl with scrawled sketches by survivors of refugee odysseys. In one child’s schoolbook, a drawing of a rubber dinghy filled with stick people and a caption, “When I want to go to Europe I am very scared, I don’t know swimming”; in another, a few shaky lines of Arabic and, in English, “War is not a good idea.”
Among the highlights: Paula Rego’s Ink and Wash Family Studies; Elisabeth Frink’s viciously exquisite Ink and Blood-pink-washed Stabbing; Eva Frankfurther’s Raddled Old East End Woman;
Kit Wood’s pencil portrait of Frosca Munster; Alice Neel’s graphite sketch of a seated Kenneth Doolittle; Leon Kossoff’s gouache of Old Charing Cross Hospital (among several other Kossoffs, an impressive part of the show). The cumulative effect is unsettling but also deeply moving.
Dimbleby, who, in addition to his journalistic career, has been chairman of the Towner for the past ten years, is stepping aside at age 85 to take on a more ceremonial role as president. Evidence of the respect in which he and Liza, who teaches at the Royal Drawing School, are held, about a dozen galleries and collections have loaned works, including the Ben Uri and the Bethlehem Museum of the Mind, two important and perhaps not widely known repositories of migrant and outsider art. As an opportunity to find in one place works that may not always be so easily accessible, this is a show not to be missed.
Drawing the Unspeakable Curated by David Dimbleby & Liza Dimbleby Galleries 5 October 2024 to 27 April 2025