Philip Loersch masterfully produces drawings of small and large manuscripts, preferably on stone and paper. His central motif is the book as a key cultural medium and data storage. For Loersch, it serves as a projection surface in the intermedial dialogue between original (hand)drawing and legible (written) text. Loersch not only reads books, he makes them his own. What is fascinating about his work is the detailed execution of the drawing with its particular fineness of line. Using the classical means of pencil and ink, he takes the question of what is an original and what is a copy to the extreme.

Loersch’s book stones confront their viewers with their physical presence. Unlike ordinary sculptures, they bear the detailed hand drawing typical for the artist, here applied with black ink and pencil. The covers, painted illusionistically in oil, suggest a book that in fact can neither be opened nor read. The rough edges of the stone stand in harsh contrast to the fine details. They create the impression of standing in front of an archaeological find from the distant past.

An example is his work ‘Hidden Michelangelo’ (2019), which seemingly preserves excerpts of texts and descriptions as well as illustrations from a monograph on the famous sculptor and painter of the Italian High Renaissance. The transfer of Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’ (1516, Louvre, Paris) into the detailed black-and-white hand drawing is representative of what Philip Loersch associates with the Italian master in his artistic ambition: ‘the idea that Michelangelo made the figure visible in the stone rather than shaping the stone into the figure. Another idea of my first book works in stone was the thought of endurance, to literally carve things in stone.’ (P. L.) Indeed, some lines in the black soapstone ‘Cuneiform’ (2018) are chiselled directly by the artist and are thus palpable. In a sculptural, handcrafted manner, Loersch refers to the earliest human written artefacts, namely Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which was inscribed on soft clay tablets.