Life drawings — Sean Crossley

Life drawings

Two series of drawings, each drawn in-situ from at la Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet from the manuscripts of Pierre Klossowski’s ‘Nietzche et le cercle vicieux’ (2018) and ‘La Monnaie vivante’ (2025). The works were produced within the frameworks of two residency programmes - the Cité de la Litterature de la Ville de Paris at le Couvent des Récollets (Paris 2018), and at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris 2025.

Please see below for images of the following public presentations of these drawings:

- Life Drawings, from the manuscripts of Pierre Klossowski’s ‘Nietzche et le cercle vicieux’,
presented in ‘Fronts(a)(b)(c)’, Winona, Brussels 2025

- ‘Affaires suspendues’ at la Cité internationale des Arts, Paris 2025
Presenting Life Drawings from the manuscripts of Pierre Klossowski’s ‘La monnaie vivante’

This project began during archive research in Paris, whilst consulting manuscripts housed at La Bibliothèque Litteraire Jacques Doucet. With photographic reproduction restricted and equipment constrained to pencil and paper, the visits gradually followed theses cues from exploratory reading and note taking into the application of academic drawing techniques during the archive consultation sessions.

The works apply technical procedures employed in academic figure drawing (such as compositional structure and modelling, the measurement and modulation of negative and positive space) as a means to create highly precise observational drawings that could be described as hand-made facsimiles.

These images were made during punctual sessions of observational drawing, focusing upon specific unpublished pages from the manuscripts of Pierre Klossowski’s ‘Nietzche et le cercle Vicieux’ and ‘La monnaie vivante’. Some pages were chosen due to the spatial qualities of a specific mise en page, others due to their material demonstration of writing as a generative procedure.

The contents of the selected vignettes and drafted texts canvas a range of notions and concepts that feedback into the reasoning and process that lead to the drawings themselves - Inversion and invention, the double, mimicry, intentionality, alienation and wasteful experimentation, amongst others. The drawings simultaneously reinforce and undermine the phantasms that preoccupy Klossowski’s authorship, they perhaps simply make contact with his work outside of any form of motivated reference.

Life Drawings, from the manuscripts of Pierre Klossowski’s ‘Nietzche et le cercle vicieux’,
presented in ‘Fronts(a)(b)(c)’, Winona, Brussels 2025
Photos: Fabrice Schneider

‘Affaires suspendues’ at la Cité internationale des Arts, Paris 2025
Presenting Life Drawings from the manuscripts of Pierre Klossowski’s ‘La monnaie vivante’
Photos: Lin Gerkman and Sean Crossley