On drawing: Gosia Wlodarczak's quest

‘Gosia’s ambition’, wrote David Bromfield, is ‘to achieve this absolute identity with the universe’. At the other extreme, and what might seem more on par with Andy Warhol’s small-minded desire to be a machine, Bromfield also thought ‘she would like to be nothing but drawing, to exist solely as an endless act of drawing, a constant immediate looking’.1 We might, then, well wonder about the sanity of Gosia’s obsessive drawing project, which seems to exist somewhere between science fiction (‘identity with the universe’) and theatre of the absurd (‘she would like to be nothing but drawing’), and which has a similar disciplined riotousness to the Outsider art that Dubuffet collected from lunatic asylums. Yet, as Bromfield demonstrates in his study and I also hope to show here, there is method in Gosia’s madness and more, much more.