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from the internet onto paper with ink and charcoal. After sifting mental theme and part of his self-referential reflections. There are,
his diverse photographic material and allowing it to interact in the not least because of his working method, only a few multi-coloured
composition, he constructs, drawn on paper, a highly complex, at examples among the substantial number of graphic works. Having
first seemingly imaginary world out of the heterogeneous, densely begun in 1977 to regularly meet John Cage to play chess, Anastasi
packed set pieces. The sheets take on an almost three-dimensional would spend the subway rides, eyes closed and, using both hands,
form. Initially, some details such as a house‘s facade, an industrial allow pencils and crayons to write on a sheet of paper on his knees.
zone or a kind of UFO are discernible; the longer the immersion into The customary vibrations of the moving subway train were ultima-
the scenery-like structure, the more it reveals of reality, the more it tely reflected in the drawings. Without the eye as a visual artist‘s
becomes critical commentary on our actual present. essential controller, the whole body mediates as an extension of the
Nature has been ousted from the urban space, as the title ‚Towering pencil, leaving a lot of leeway for chance and rendering the artist
Metal Wood‘ already suggests. The scale in the picture changes, invisible. This applies to all Blind Drawings, including works in which
spatiality is broken, so that the eye searches in vain for a hold on Anastasi hands over the drawing process to the pens in his trou-
the surface of the picture, rich with content. The world seems to ser pocket on paper folded several times. Anastasi‘s overwhelming,
collapse. Ultimately, the sheets are metaphors for our endangered, vast wall work ‚60 Minutes with Yellow‘ moves closer to Informa-
if not already destroyed civilisation. The movie ‚Metropolis‘ is not lism. But in view of his conceptual works, it is evident how little one
very far off. can speak of styles today and that Anastasi deals with fundamental
artistic questions in his works. His drawing ‚Agnostic IV‘ shows that
In the face of such dramatic urban formations, even the scribblings they are also of political importance. As far as the arms can reach,
of Anastasi, the old master of minimalism, can have a calming effect, from the solar plexus at the centre, the draughtsman spreads a den-
though they too have critical potential. In response to the Viet- se network of pencil lines radiating in all directions. With the infinite
nam War, for instance, the artist fit out an entire room in Hamburg eruptive strokes swelling out of the dark, deep centre, Anastasi‘s
with camouflage material to, as it were, disguise both perpetrator ‚Agnostic IV‘ from 2000, both in its title and content, may have
and victim. Negation, erasure, also of the artist‘s genius, is a funda- fairly precisely anticipated the endangered state of our globe – here

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