During his five-week residency at The Guardian, Alexander Roob created over one thousand line drawings to capture the daily activities that contribute to the production of the newspaper, both within the offices and beyond in the company of reporters and photographers. Sequences of these mute and purely visual drawings were published in the newspaper during the residency. A pull-out section of the G2 section of The Guardian was devoted to the drawings on 27th December 2002.

Alexander Roob uses drawn line to make an immediate record of events as they unfold in various locations that attract his attention. These locations range from extraordinary ones such as laboratories of pharmaceutical research, an institute of atomphysics, a slaughterhouse, a coal-mine, the UN headquarters in Geneva, to more ordinary public places in various cities (Nürnberg, Geneva, Shanghai), universities and museums.

Roob began working on CS, his long-term drawing project, in 1985. CS has a number of meanings; it stands for the German 'Sieh es!' which means 'See it, look at it!' but also for Comic Strip. A basic idea behind the CS drawing project is that for Roob line-drawing has a lively, fluid quality which is able to compete with technical media like photography and film in recording reality. However, whilst a photograph records just one instant, the drawing process is synchronous to the unfolding situation or event and is thereby capable of retaining its special tension. The CS -project is conceived as an unbound comic-strip where the single drawing is autonomous and free from the restrictions of language; it flows in a stream of perception, sometimes criss-crossed by levels of fantasy and memory.

Alexander Roob was born in Germany in 1956 and studied painting at the Berlin Academy of Art. The thousands of drawings that he has produced in different locations have been published in five volumes. His drawings have also been exhibited in galleries and museums in many parts of Europe including the Städtische Galerie, Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1998; the Graphic Collection Albertina, Vienna, 1999; the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt / Main, 2000; and the Goethe Institut in Rotterdam, 2000.

CS: Guardian Report was supported by Delfina Studio Trust and the Goethe Institut.

Alexander Roob CS Guardian Report, 2002
Published in G2, The Guardian, 27nd December 2002