Små figurskitser 1864 - 1941

Niels Larsen Stevns made these small figure sketches on paper, and it's like catching a fleeting thought. The marks are tentative, searching; it's all about the process of looking, feeling out the shapes of bodies. Look closely, and you can almost feel the graphite moving across the page. The lines are thin, almost transparent, and the figures emerge from the ground, ghosts in the making. See how the artist uses a cluster of lines to suggest the fall of fabric, or the turn of a head. There's a figure standing front-on, towards the right of the page, described with just a few strokes, but somehow, it evokes a sense of presence. It reminds me of Giacometti’s drawings, that same sense of figures emerging from a haze. Ultimately, art's not about fixed answers but embracing the questions. Stevns is asking, “What does it mean to see, to capture a moment, to give form to the formless?”