“That day my cells had been stirred, they had been shaken and jolted, sabotaged and thrown into convulsive spasms.” [1] Every tool has its place. Everything has its order. The variety of materials invites trying, dwelling, experimenting. The artist’s workspaces mirror her deep interest in small structures, whether the cells under her microscope or the marks under her pencil. Science and art condense in the work of Denise Schellmann and, in her large-format works on paper, become tactile traces and fragments. The Austrian artist draws her knowledge of the microcosm from her doctoral studies in medical and pharmaceutical chemistry; she is also a student of the master’s programme “Art & Science” at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. “Researching” describes only one facet of her approach to art. As the artist puts it, “[…] the work in the laboratory resembles the work in the studio,” since “[her] fascination with the propagation of new cell structures on a scientific and an artistic level” is one of her driving forces. As her “slide,” the interdisciplinary artist uses paper as grainy as possible, always 160 g/m² by Canson, and in place of pipette and tweezers she works with soft KOH-I-NOOR pencils and, since her artist residency in Singapore in 2015, with Derwent Coloursoft coloured pencils. Settling on a proven material follows a long process of scientific exploration and intensive probing of possibilities. Yet whereas research tests a specific hypothesis, its goal clearly defined, Denise Schellmann’s drawings arise from an intuitive working process. In the spirit of Paul Klee’s much-quoted line, “a line is a dot that goes for a walk,” Schellmann’s pencil has a freedom of movement of its own. A childlike curiosity drives her to submerge again and again into the micro-universe of filigree strokes, to observe, to try, to analyse and to collect. Unlike Klee’s small-scale drawing, her “dance of the pencil” lives from the large gesture, led not by the wrist but by the whole arm. In all-over manner there is no top and no bottom; the meditative beginning of the process gains depth, acceleration and density that concentrate into graphic clusters. The description of her method, the scribbled technique and the tissue-like underlying stroke, recalls Cy Twombly. Her “lure of meaning,” to use Roland Barthes’s phrase for Twombly’s fragments and signs drawn from literature, history and myth, springs instead from the world of research and science: single-celled organisms, cell membranes, spider silk, strands of DNA. In her consistent use and fusion of methods from both fields, free of rules or norms, an engagement with the work of Nikolaus Gansterer can be read. Jorinde Voigt’s translation of phenomena into algorithms of fine pencil lines, too, stands close in its precision to Denise Schellmann’s working process. Her works bear no titles, deliberately leaving the viewer room for their own interpretations. That same openness has accompanied Schellmann’s own path: through the criticism, discussion and encouragement of her mentor Loys Egg, as she recounts, she found the room to “explore [her] own potential […] and to unfold artistically.” Her large-format graphic works, untitled, are an invitation to enter the scene and to assemble it into a universe, a narrative, of one’s own. Like a research expedition, Denise Schellmann draws her counterpart into her cosmos of deliberate imperfection, and does not let go. Stephanie Sentall [1] Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle: Mescaline, Munich/Vienna 1986, p. 11.