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Drawing Room

With Drawing Room, the two art historians Alexander Sairally and Esther Schulte offer a platform for exhibitions of varying formats, from classical to experimental. In a private setting, visitors are given the opportunity to have an intensive encounter with current artistic positions. In addition to solo exhibitions by emerging and already established artists, thematic and conceptual group exhibitions and projects will also be shown in Drawing Room. To supplement this, excursions into other artistic genres will occasionally be made.

About the room

Be it the Bishop's residence in Limburg, Berlin's International Airport, or the Stuttgart 21 project – what we are currently experiencing is the grandiose wasting of funds in major construction projects in Germany. This is ostensibly due to mismanagement and the resulting skyrocketing costs. On closer consideration, however, we can make out a worrying development in society as a whole: a lust for power and greatness.

Even the art market has dedicated itself to the principle "bigger-faster-better"; moderation is not in demand. The art scene, in particular, seems to have lost any sensuousness and frequently even any meaning. In vogue are large multinational galleries that resemble and function as corporations, as are major artists and mega-format artworks; a trend leading in a completely false direction. This type of art distances itself ever more from society, becoming the plaything of a few well-heeled investment buyers and -collectors. Marketing, branding and artist ranking lists are the new watchwords. Any preoccupation with content hardly seems to take place any more.

This type of gigantism was already critically examined 40 years ago by the economist, manager and business ethics philosopher Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1911 Bonn – 1977 Lausanne/St. Moritz) who immigrated to Great Britain in 1937. In his major work "Small is beautiful. Economics As If People Mattered" he championed a "miniaturisation of technology", hoping thereby "to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption".

The propositions of Ernst Friedrich Schumacher as abstractly applied to the art market are highly topical. Influenced by Schumacher's ideas of "a return to a human scale" we see Drawing Room as an effort to create an inspirational space for a content-based examination of art and culture. Thereby the title "Small is beautiful" symbolizes our "small" exhibition room and the close contact between artists and visitors. Our aim is to set a counterpoint to current art-market tendencies, and to bring art, artist and recipient into a concentrated exchange in a salon-like atmosphere.

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Alexander Sairally

born 1963, is an art historian. He has been curating exhibitions since 1998, and provides consulting services to companies and individuals on building their art collections. He has been an advisor and curator at the LEVY Galerie for ten years, and was responsible, among other things, for setting up LEVY 1st. VIEW, and rejuvenating the program. From 1998 – 2001 Sairally was an associate professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, and since 2006 has been teaching in the department of exhibition design and management at the Danube University Krems (Austria).

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Esther Schulte

born 1967, completed her art history studies with an M. Phil. at the University of Glasgow. Following professional posts as Research Assistant at the Paintings Department of the Royal Collection and in the Impressionist and Modern Art Department at Christie’s in London, she currently curates a collection of 18th and 19th century marine paintings for a Hamburg shipping company.