Tortoise 1966

Vladimír Boudník made this print, Tortoise, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. The smudgy, almost symmetrical image is built from a palette of pinks and blacks, and you can almost feel him at work in the studio, coaxing these images from the metal plate. The texture of this print really grabs me: Boudník gets so much mileage from a pretty limited range of hues. The darkest blacks feel velvety, while the pinks look porous and spongey, like volcanic rock. Look at the center of the form and you can see this incredible pull-mark, running from top to bottom. It’s a bold move, almost violent, but it brings the whole piece together. It’s like he’s drawing a line in the sand. Looking at Boudník, I can’t help but think of other artists like Antoni Tàpies, who were similarly obsessed with texture and raw materiality. Like them, he reminds us that art is as much about asking questions as it is about answering them.