Four Boys / Four Horses

Four Boys / Four Horses, 1996
four drawings
ink marker on paper
212 × 185 cm; 215 × 309 cm; 209 × 217 cm; 213.7 × 237.5 cm

Four Boys / Four Horses unfolds across four large marker drawings, each bringing together a different boy and a different horse. The drawings were made one after another, and something of that order remains in the work: contours shift, bodies turn, angles tighten or open, and the relation between boy and horse changes with them. Four singular encounters form a quiet dramatic arc without becoming a narrative.

The drawings are reduced almost entirely to line. Large sheets, black marker, little modeling, no setting. The line has to establish body, distance, touch, direction and the smallest changes of posture while remaining fully visible as a line. It does not disappear into what it depicts. At moments, one contour almost gives itself over to another: in one drawing, a horse’s hind leg seems to vanish into the subtle play of the boy’s legs. Such small decisions keep anatomy precise and unstable at once. Each drawing is both an image and the record of a movement of the hand.

The four encounters are strikingly calm, even elegiac. The boys meet the viewer with a slight smile and a self-possessed gaze; the eyes, drawn at subtly different heights, can seem to follow whoever stands before them. This quietness does not soften the images. It gives them their peculiar directness.

For Estermann, the horse has something of the intensity of an idol. Encountering it can be comparable to a young art student seeing a work by James Lee Byars for the first time. The boy can be understood in this register too—as someone standing alone before a presence that cannot simply be assimilated. The work carries a question of courage: the courage to remain alone in such an encounter.

The images are explicit, but they do not exhaust themselves in what they show. Their schematic clarity leaves the encounter strangely open. “Show everything, say nothing” comes close to their logic, even as the sentence undoes itself. Boy, horse, line and gaze are all plainly there, yet the image keeps more than it gives away. Something remains that is neither hidden nor explainable: a quiet radiance belonging to the encounter itself.

versions and reactivations:

The work has existed in several material states, including paper templates (1996), preparatory drawings (1995–96), slide projections (2000), an edition of mugs (2000), posters, and a print on panel (2023). The templates have allowed the images to persist and to be reactivated across different materials and situations.

In 2023, Last Tango, Zurich, returned to Four Boys / Four Horses through its drawings, templates, archival photographs and later versions. The original drawings #2, #3 and #4, long believed to be lost, resurfaced in the archive of agnès b. in 2025 and were returned to the artist.

shown in:
“Robert Estermann & Oz Oderbolz”, Last Tango, Zurich, Switzerland (2023)
“11th Biennial of Visual Arts VALUES”, Pancevo, Serbia (2004)
“PARA…SIGNS”, Elisabeth Kaufmann, Zurich, Switzerland (2003)
“Kunstszene Zürich”, Toni-Areal, Zurich, Switzerland (2003)
“seeyuatthepremierefair”, Kongresszentrum Rauchstrasse, Berlin, Germany (2002)
“Robert Estermann”, Galerie du Jour agnès b., Paris, France (2002, solo show)
“UNLIMITED.NL#4”, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2001)
“drawings 1”, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2001, solo show)
“open nights”, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2000)
“Sin-Aesthetics”, MK Expositieruimte, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1996)

selected bibliography:
Linda Jensen and Arianna Gellini, exhibition text for Robert Estermann & Oz Oderbolz, Last Tango, Zurich, 2023
Ji Yoon Yang and Gregory Maass, About the Kim Kim Gallery show with Robert Estermann, interview, Corner Art Space, Seoul, 2013
Sue Golding (Johnny Golding), Four Horses, Four Boys and the Techne of Line Drawing or Sex, Smell, Touch, Light, Air & Speed (the great western internet) [after Turner], D (is for drawing), June 2004, pp. 76–79
11th Biennial of Visual Arts VALUES, exhibition catalogue, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Pancevo, 2004, pp. 102–103
Tout est important – Hans-Ulrich Obrist parle avec Robert Estermann very yellow plane, Galerie du Jour agnès b., Paris, 2002, audio CD, 40 min.
Daniel Kurjakovic, Improper Thinking / Uneigentliche Politik, in Robert Estermann. Pleasure, Habeas Corpus, Motoricity. The Great Western Possible, Kunstmuseum Luzern / edition fink, Zurich, 2007
Robert Estermann very yellow plane, booklet, self-published, 2001
art-das Kunstmagazin, Elisabeth Lebovici, 20. Internationale Kritiker-Umfrage, Januar 2001, Hamburg, pp. 46-47
de Voorkant, Eric Hagoort: Magere man lost op in korrelig beeld, 26. mai 2000, Amsterdam, p. 14
Caroline de Bie, Four Horses, HTV De Ijsberg, no. 1, Rotterdam, 1997

see also:
Staircase, 2011
Four Pink Flags, 2026

Critical history — selected readings

The following texts and excerpts, written between 1997 and 2023, form part of the work’s critical history.

Linda Jensen and Arianna Gellini, 2023
Exhibition text for Robert Estermann & Oz Oderbolz, Last Tango, Zurich
full text (PDF)

Excerpt:

For this exhibition we have taken an “archeological” approach, looking back at an older series of Robert Estermann’s drawings Four Boys / Four Horses (1996). What are the questions that come up when we encounter this image? The boy seems to be otherworldly, with his Mona Lisa half-smile, gazing at us innocently. The horse, of uncertain gender, is calm and surprisingly curious. Could the line drawing be abstracting, impairing, or even subverting our full comprehension of what’s going on in the image? What is it that is making us deal or not deal with these unruly lines?

The source materials at the entrance produce a time travel back to the artist’s studio. It’s 1995–96, when Robert was studying at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris. Four Boys / Four Horses started as one drawing before becoming four drawings, with each image staging a singular experience. Exhibited at Last Tango, Boy / Horse is the preparatory drawing for a mural inside a Parisian staircase, later becoming the template for Four Boys / Four Horses #1. […] The paper cuts (templates) are as Robert describes them, “the DNA that never got destroyed.” […] One of the rare constants in his work is the expressionism of the angles. Robert gets excited by the idea of movement of a line, the radicality of the angle, the freedom of a line to relate to our existence.

Ji Yoon Yang and Gregory Maass, 2013
About the Kim Kim Gallery show with Robert Estermann, interview, Corner Art Space, Seoul
full interview (PDF, EN)

Excerpt:

GM: […] He sees sex as a dimension between people. It’s something in reach of humans, which provokes madness. […] He said that the sexiness of sex is interesting to him, not sex itself. For him it’s like a color. It’s like something un-describable. […] He says this is a pre-linguistic, a pre-spoken entity. It’s like before there was speech, there was already this pattern in space between human beings, which is sex. […] He said one remarkable thing concerning sex, he said it’s an invisible anchor in space.

There are a lot of misunderstandings surrounding these drawings […]. Firstly these are 4 different works, hence the title: 4 Boys, 4 Horses. They all differ in some way. It’s Robert’s understanding of the term singular. Each of these drawings represents a singularity to him. […] For him the boy in the drawing is constructed like the Mona Lisa. See here, even the eyes seem to follow the spectator.

For Robert the horse represents something similar to the golden sun of James Lee Byars, some idol of Robert. I quote: “The boy could be a young art student who sees James Lee Byars’ work for the first time.” He says that the work is about courage, courage to be alone.

Sue Golding (Johnny Golding), 2004
Four Horses, Four Boys and the Techne of Line Drawing or Sex, Smell, Touch, Light, Air & Speed (the great western internet) [after Turner]
published in D (is for drawing), June 2004
full text (PDF, EN)

Excerpt:

4. FOUR HORSES / FOUR BOYS AND THE TECHNE OF DRAWING. Perhaps what we are groping toward, blindly or otherwise, is a kind of poetic whose ability to grasp ‘the there’, to appropriate it and make it ‘mine’, whatever its condition resembles more closely a kind of recipe: of the literal, the elemental, the periodic chemical, the gene pool, the mimetic, shot through with a ‘something else’ (say the folds of its smell, taste, voice, touch). A different sense of time—perhaps a ‘cooking time’; even a toxic time (for cooking need not produce something healthy for it to ‘work’). Maybe it just boils down to a question of seeing with one’s ears, hearing with one’s nose, smelling with one’s eyes and etc. Or maybe it is just a plea to take seriously habeas corpus, ‘there shall be the body’ for any and all forms of rhizomatic drawing to occur.

5. THE RADICALLY A-RADICAL EVENT OF (THIS) DRAWING. […] We might wish to call this a kind of synthetic surface poetic; that libidinal economy of the beat-beat beating, replete with ‘acoustic’ vibration and teetering on, with, amongst and around what Estermann alone is able to condense in his line drawings: ie, a rhizomatic tension; powerful, whimsical and quite beyond (because quite within and amongst) the banalities of good and evil.

Daniel Kurjakovic, 2007
Improper Thinking / Uneigentliche Politik
in Robert Estermann. Pleasure, Habeas Corpus, Motoricity. The Great Western Possible, Kunstmuseum Luzern / edition fink, Zurich
full text (PDF, EN) /
Volltext (PDF, DE)

Excerpt:

On the other hand there is no reason to conceal the fact that Robert Estermann’s work repeatedly presents an engagement with obscenity. However, the obscene—and this is a crucial observation—is not turned into a spectacle, quite the reverse. […] In Four Boys / Four Horses four boys each copulating with a horse are made “improper” once again by being schematised.

In a sense, then, Robert Estermann always works with coded scenarios. […] The term “code” does not mean, as it does in ordinary language, a secret code. Here it is more generally and openly meant as the aid required if information is to be conveyed in an effective manner. […] Although the diagram appears abstract without explanation, once it has been explained, it becomes an effective way of packaging and conveying information. […] Codes like Saussure’s diagram make the statements associated with them no less ambiguous, even though they give them concrete form. Many of Robert Estermann’s drawings—his works as a whole?—perhaps function in a not dissimilar fashion.

Caroline de Bie, 1997
“Four Horses”, HTV De Ijsberg, no. 1, Rotterdam
full text (PDF, EN)

Excerpt:

Four large drawings are hanging at the wall of MK Expositieruimte. […] Only the horse changes perceptibly, from left to right, from graceful into flat, from horse into deer, dog, beast. Robert Estermann points out the man who also slightly changes, he turns somewhat. With the little streaks on the animal’s body one can suspect a turn also there. The man turns a little towards profile (although the face stays almost frontal) while the drawing itself seems to get thinner. […] The four drawings are like four cut-out pictures from a film.

These images are his language, his sequences. In their quietness they have their own space […]. Between all the violence in image and sound the four men with horses hang imperturbable. […] But Estermann’s image is equally tall as the horse and his deed is as easy as self-evident. It seems. […] What misses though is Estermann’s hand. […] To Estermann the little stripes are important, as important as the fact that one line bears various meanings, as important as the minimal streaks on large bodies that indicate turning, change.