Sleep, quietude and dreams pervade the work in this show by the outgoing students of the Royal Drawing School's postgraduate programme. Here, drawing is a tool for visualisation, for combining unexpected things, to play with scale, to hesitate and to leave things unsaid. And sleeping people make great life models.
Sleep: access point to fantastical worlds, pleasant or not. In Nour el Saleh's drawing, Strangers, Daffodils and a Couple of Loose Artichokes, two red people, half-length, large-breasted, grimace at each other in front of a sunny landscape. The horror unfolds slowly as you make out the tiny human victims in their hands. Tactile and compelling and a bit gross.
Another dream, Dexter Orszagh's adaptation of Elihu Vedder's (amazing) 19th-century painting The Questioner of the Sphinx preserves the odd, stark composition of the original, amplifying its sense of mystery with dreamlike colour. With Orszagh's visible reworkings and tentative sketchy lines, the drawing oscillates between finish and unfinish, disrupting the stasis of the ancient monument with contingency. Maybe the sphinx still has something to say.
Other artists stand firmly in the tangible world, but show us the fluidity of our wakeful perception. Shana P Lohrey's Red giant at noon brings the energy of a busy street to the exhibition with its wobbling line and combination of observation from life with an acknowledgement of the what it's actually like to stand on the street doing a drawing. The balconies are carefully picked out, but they shift in and out of step with each other, a record of the artist's wandering eyes.
I wonder if 'The Best' in the exhibition title is in fact code for 'most likely to furnish the drawing rooms of west London'. This is not to say the work is bad - far from it - but you get the impression that saleability has been prioritised in this show, it feels a bit safe. But it is at Christie's after all and an artist has to earn a buck. More experimentation at the final show next week?