Alan Brooks – City @ MOT International – London

Is there any other western European urban space more overwhelming than London? More crowded and excitingly grey?

English artist Alan Brooks is back to London’s MOT International with his latest expo “City”. 100 drawings serve him to depict a collective idea of an un-named urban environment. The artist’s photo-litho like reproductions are obsessive in their labour and elaborately detailed: sourced from the internet, reportage and personal photographs, they are placed in proximity to diagrammatic, psycho-geographic and literary fragments.

Each drawing operates as an individual pictorial fiction whilst also being a part of a broader, more complex narrative dramatising the ideals and desires of the metropolitan citizen, the architecture and substructures of the urban environment and the socio-political histories that entwine the development of the city space.

The artist has taken Frans Maseree’s early graphic novel The City: A Vision in Woodcuts (1925) as a point of departure. While Masereel’s book of woodcuts revealed the dangerous, hedonistic vivacity and chaos of a Weimar era city, Brooks’ drawings render a dissonant and sprawling narrative of contemporary space.

A long list of symbols and crowds which conform a homogeneous view of our impersonal metropoli. Highly recommended, “City” is a great way to scape from your routine in central London, and then dive back with the proud feeling of the cosmopolitan. More installation views and information on MOT’s webpage.