Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
German; 20th-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
82%
Kneeling Woman. 1914. Woodcut
The touches of ink all across her skin; the draggings-through of thick marks down her face, pits, breasts, rump — this is Schmidt-Rottluff jumbling desires for his subject and his medium. Apart from these forward, frisky (superficial) elements of the print's form, there's its balance, too. A dark plane takes up the bottom left/top right diagonal, an uninked light plane the opposite. This causes the whole background to curl out at its corners towards the paper's surface, exacerbated by the figure pushing her ass backwards (just below center) and her tits forwards (right at center), like she's forcing the image away while thrusting herself out of it. Notwithstanding the flattening flatness of the medium, this all makes for a type of pictorial space that feels static when you're looking at it and dynamic when you look away: everything that's in front of something is always just barely behind something else. (2024)