William Anastasi

In the 1960s, William Anastasi began to devote himself to new media such as video, sound, and conceptual forms of painting and drawing, distancing himself from Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing art movement at the time. In 1963 he began to develop his so-called “unsighted drawings”: Until his death in 2023, he always drew with his eyes closed in order to shut out art history – or rather art itself.

The Schering Stiftung Collection holds one sheet of his “Pocket Drawings,”  which came out of this intention. These drawings were produced on a folded piece of paper small enough to fit into the artist’s pant pocket where he also kept a pencil. During his walks through the city, Anastasi rubbed the pencil lead against the paper without being able to see the traces the pencil left on the paper. This resulted in (cross-)hatchings that recorded the artist’s movements in the form of unconscious drawing traces.

Untitled (Pocket Drawing) (2011) consists of thin China paper folded into 64 rectangles in a way so that each rectangle contains an individual drawing. Within the precise boundaries defined by the paper folds, we can see 64 different pencil (cross-)hatchings, and recognize a system defined by order and chance. Looking at the sheet inspires reflections on walking and thinking as well as on the relationship between the movement of the body and that of the pencil.