Hunter Shooting 1940 - 1944

Curator: Hello and welcome. Before us, we have Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubínčan's "Hunter Shooting," an oil painting dating from 1940 to 1944. Editor: Wow, a chaotic clash of earth tones punctuated with these violent bursts of red and flashes of canary yellow. It feels almost oppressive, like the hunt itself. Curator: The "matter-painting" technique, which utilizes thickly applied pigment and textural variations, enhances that feeling. This impasto embodies the ethos of abstract expressionism—that potent postwar aesthetic—emphasizing the act of painting itself, the very struggle to create meaning from the chaos of existence. Think of the symbolic weight we load onto the hunt: life, death, survival. Editor: Struggle is the perfect word. I mean, look at the surface – it's almost a relief map of emotional turmoil. I get this real sense of confinement, as if the hunter is not a powerful figure but somehow trapped within the landscape. The earth colors…they dominate. Red for the kill… yellow, almost like an acidic fear response. Curator: Perhaps, but the visual tension between representation and abstraction opens doors. What might appear chaotic also embodies a distorted landscape tradition, filtered through subjective experience. Weisz-Kubínčan, belonging to the expressionist movement, often investigated that tension during the tumultuous period between the world wars. His use of landscape becomes less about portraying something concrete, and more about emotionality, psychological depth. Editor: You can see it! That yellow streak running through—lightning? Or just a psychic break being externalized as a visual element? Makes you wonder about the human cost, the internal landscape of violence in that era. Curator: It asks us to reconsider comfortable binaries. Hunter/hunted. Order/chaos. Abstraction/representation. It resonates profoundly even today, inviting reflection on primal instincts in the modern world. Editor: Definitely stays with you… a dark and muddy mirror, reflecting some uncomfortable truths back at the viewer. Curator: A powerful piece, wouldn't you agree? Editor: Absolutely. I’m haunted but grateful for the experience.