This Summer, Galerie Templon is showcasing contemporary drawing in an original and celebratory show featuring Omar Ba, Abdelkader Benchamma, Norbert Bisky, Oda Jaune and Chiharu Shiota. The artists were invited to appropriate the gallery walls and create an array of unique wall installations. The ephemeral works will be accompanied by a new series of drawings produced specially for the exhibition.

The five artists, members of the same generation and hailing from three different continents, Africa, Asia and Europe, represent a globalised world where different cultures meet, mingle and merge. What their work has in common is the role given to drawing, elevated to the same rank as painting, sculpture and installations. Their drawing practice is thus given free rein to explore a range of tools, materials and supports as they cover the walls and appropriate the space.

The From the Paper to the Wall exhibition invites visitors on a journey where they can experience the same feelings of playfulness and freedom. It can be visited in the gallery from 6 June to 26 July and online via a dedicated website.

Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar and Geneva. Omar Ba's iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. His work, with its enigmatic nature and poetic intensity, rejects all forms of didactic narrative, seeking instead to express his subconscious and his symbolic interpretation of the real.

His work has featured at various events including BOZAR in Brussels (2017) and the Dakar Biennale (2014). From 30 May to 10 November 2019, the MMFA in Montreal is holding a solo exhibition of his work, Omar Ba: Visions partagées. His work is on show at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), France, Collection Nationale Suisse and Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Born in 1975 in Mazamet, France, Abdelkader Benchamma lives and works in Paris and Montpellier.

He adopts a variety of artistic approaches, taking in everything from a simple sheet of paper to installations. The medium he prefers to work in is black and white drawing. Inspired by literature, philosophy, astrophysics and esoteric reflections, his works create visual scenarios that question our relationship to reality as they probe the frontiers of the invisible.

Winner of the Drawing Now Award in 2015, he was commissioned to create a piece for the New York Drawing Center the same year. His work has featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including L'horizon des Evénements, at Centquatre in Paris (2018). He is taking part in several group exhibitions in 2019: Eldorama, Lille 3000, 100 artistes dans la Ville-ZAT 2019, Montpellier, with a public commission, and Landscapes, the Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa (Japan) in August.

Born in 1970 in Leipzig, Germany. His treatment of landscapes and exploration of the portrait and narrative structure place him firmly in the tradition of great European painting. Norbert Bisky's experiments with breaking down forms and with blocks of colour also place him on the borderline of abstract art.

His art has been widely shown internationally, including at the Rostock Art Gallery which held a retrospective of his work in 2014. His pieces feature in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.

Born in 1979 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Oda Jaune lives and works in Paris. Over the last ten years, the artist has developed a unique and poetic visual language redolent of surrealism and morphing. Bodily metamorphosis, symbolising life and its incessant, inexorable changes, lies at the heart of Oda Jaune's work. Emotion enters into dialogue with the strange, resulting in the birth of mad and monstrous creatures, contemporary visions of the world. Oda Jaune has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Europe. A major retrospective of her work was held in 2018 at the National Art Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1972, Chiharu Shiota has been living and working in Berlin since 1997. Using woven yarn, the artist combines performance, body art and installations in a process that places the body at its centre. Her protean artistic approach plays with the notions of temporality, movement, memory and dreams, demanding a dual engagement from the viewer, both physical and emotional.

In 2015 Chiharu Shiota represented Japan at the Venice Biennale. In 2019, she will be exhibiting at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo with The Soul Trembles, a major retrospective of her work.

See the Online Viewing Room

Press release courtesy Templon.