The Moscow Drawing Book

Per Dybvig understands drawing as an immediate form of observation. His work is based on quick, open lines that register gestures, postures, movements, and social situations without fixing them into closed compositions.

The drawings often remain close to the sketch, yet they are never merely preliminary. They operate between notation, caricature, narrative fragment, and visual record, allowing small details of everyday life to become charged with tension, humour, and unease.

In The Moscow Drawing Book, Moscow appears not as an architectural panorama or a documentary city portrait, but as a sequence of fleeting encounters. People in streets, cafés, hotel lobbies, and interiors are observed in passing: waiting, talking, smoking, moving, pausing. Dybvig’s line does not aim at descriptive completeness. Instead, it sharpens what is momentary and unstable. A posture, a glance, a body in space, or a casual gesture becomes the starting point for a wider sense of urban atmosphere.

The book shows drawing as a medium of direct perception. Its images seem to follow the rhythm of looking: fragmentary, mobile, sometimes comic, sometimes disturbing. Moscow is not presented as a coherent image of a city, but as a field of observations in which public space, social behaviour, and individual presence constantly shift. Through this open and restless form, The Moscow Drawing Book turns the act of drawing into a way of reading the city.