Masker van Beethoven before 1913

This is Pierre Peeters' "Masker van Beethoven," and it's a print, so it was made using a matrix—like a plate—to transfer the image onto paper. And I love how the printmaking process mirrors the act of masking itself, where an image is layered and transferred. The tonality is so interesting here, it’s all browns, like different shades of sepia, like photographs from the past. If you look closely, you can see the layering of marks, the cross-hatching, which builds up the image gradually, like the sculpting of a mask. The face emerges from the darkness, a kind of unveiling or a revealing of the mask. It kind of reminds me of the work of Käthe Kollwitz, who also used printmaking to explore themes of grief, memory, and the human condition. But what I love about this image is the ambiguity and the sense of art as a conversation across time. We're always riffing on what came before, remixing and reinterpreting. It is not so much about a fixed image but the process of discovery.