Pietà 1939 - 1940

Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan’s ‘Pietà’ is an oil painting where the artist conjures a sacred scene through earthy browns and greens, punctuated by somber blacks and yellows. You can imagine the artist at work here; the painting is made up of many shifting marks, each one laid down with conviction, as the image slowly came into being through instinct and the movement of the hand. I can imagine Weisz-Kubínčan, wrestling with the paint, building up the surface and scraping it back, in a constant state of call and response with his materials. The brushstrokes across the work suggest an intuitive, almost frantic, need to get the image down. The painting is thick with feeling, raw and unresolved. This recalls the work of other painters who use the medium to ask questions about themselves and the world. The result is a very human scene, full of uncertainty, with a meaning that changes over time.