The Bomb Factory presents Tracing Traces- an exhibition featuring three resident artists Preslav Kostov, Laszlo Von Dohnyanyi and Filip Lav (Austria), whose work will be in dialogue at their Holborn Gallery space for the first time.
Referencing both contemporary and art historical techniques, the show explores how these three artists reverse the relationship between drawing and painting, examining how processes of reproduction can be unsettled, re-routed, or made newly visible. Each artist engages with the language of the drawing not in the pursuit of image, but as a site where traces accumulate, shift, and resist closure.
From Ancient Egyptian, post-Medieval image pouncing, to the development of the Camera Obscura, society has long found ways to capture the essence of an image. Here however, these historical techniques become subverted, as these three artists combine this technical application with a physical mark making that pushes the limits of form in a modern age of multiplicity and image fragmentation.
Preslav Kostov explores memory through accumulative Xerox transfers, where source, image, and manipulation are mediated by an agile responsiveness to surface. By disrupting the aesthetics of faithful reproduction, Kostov opens a space between machine precision and human presence, creating compositions that oscillate between repetition and rupture. In doing so, his work questions the stability of image and narrative in a post-AI society.
László von Dohnányi translates the mechanical logic of printing into the act of drawing itself. Using rulers and marker pens, he mimics the printer’s back-and-forth rhythm, staging an analogue performance of digital reproduction. His works probe how the aesthetics of the machine can be embodied, slowed down, and reimagined through the hand.
Filip Lav subverts the material conventions of the street poster, working with blueback paper – the industrial backing usually hidden from view. By drawing directly onto its surface, he inverts figure and ground: the utilitarian blue becomes a luminous foreground, against which fragile, ethereal lines collide with stark, grid-like structures. His works channel the textures of public space, reframing the visual residue of the street as an arena for quiet, meditative mark-making.
Together, the works question what it means to “trace” in an age of endless reproduction—whether through mechanical memory, embodied repetition, or the reactivation of overlooked material. In Tracing Traces, drawing is not opposed to translation but entangled with it, revealing the tensions between gesture and system, surface and depth, private mark and public image.
LOCATION: 99 Kingsway, WC2B 6QX
TIMES: Thurs - Sat, 12-6pm
