Rilke: The Duino Elegies 1996

This small watercolor by Maria Bozoky feels like a late-night improvisation, a response to Rilke’s poetry through the suggestive power of abstract forms. See how she’s built up this nocturnal space with washes of dark blue and grey, then scratched in these frantic white lines and small marks like stars. Is it an interior space? An exterior one? And this strange bird-like shape, suspended in the middle – is it rising or falling? I love the vulnerability of watercolor, how it bleeds and stains, documenting every move the artist makes. Maybe Bozoky was chasing after the same elusive feeling that Rilke was exploring in his elegies, that longing for something just beyond our reach. It reminds me of Guston and how he chased the ineffable in his paintings.