Double Take, exhibition review: Drawings here uncannily resemble photos

The show reflects artists’ consistent denial of orthodoxy as they stretch and strain media and their properties to find original languages, says Ben Luke

I, robot: Thomas Zummer’s Study for a Portrait of Elektro, Smoking (

Ben Luke14 April 2016

When Henry Fox Talbot called the first photography book The Pencil of Nature, he recognised drawing and photography’s closeness. Double Take is an apt title for this two-venue show: drawings here uncannily resemble photos, while playful photographic experiments deliver decidedly hand-rendered imagery.

Thomas Zummer’s robot portraits look like archival prints but are in fact rendered using erasers and sandpaper to rub and etch into a fine graphite powder. Paul Chiappe has taken a classroom photo and reconstructed it in a hyperrealist drawing style several times over, deleting and moving the children, to eerie effect.

Meanwhile, artists have repeatedly attempted to draw in photographic light: examples here by modernist greats such as László Moholy-Nagy are beautiful, both as images and objects. The two parts dovetail nicely.

The show reflects artists’ consistent denial of orthodoxy as they stretch and strain media and their properties to find original languages. It asks us to look carefully at how works are made, and it rewards us repeatedly.

Drawing Room until June 5 (020 7394 5657, drawingroom.org.uk); The Photographers’ Gallery April 14 until July 3 (020 7087 9300, thephotographersgallery.org.uk)