Barbel Messmann’s art comes out of her preoccupation with drawing. She sounds the depths of the medium’s material basis and possibilities by employing each of its constituents—format, surface texture and pattern of the paper, consistency and transparency of color, etc.—as a formal element of equal importance and opening them to other media, especially painting. Recurring themes—such as an interest in patterns or woven-together lines, or in the materiality of the specific substrate used and in the colors of tempera, wax crayon, oil paint, watercolors, and india ink, which attain a haptic quality