White Nights 1922

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky made this print, 'White Nights', using a woodcut technique, where everything is either black or white. The starkness reminds us of the way early 20th-century artists were grappling with how to represent modern life. I love the materiality of this piece. It’s so tactile, despite being just black ink on white paper. You can almost feel the rough texture of the woodblock. There is something about the graphic directness of this image that pulls me in. Look at the way the wood grain is rendered in the shed in the foreground and how the dark horizontal lines create a sense of depth. The two figures sitting on the bench become almost a dark void, as if they are fading back into the darkness, which makes me think of German Expressionist artists like Kathe Kollwitz, who captured the raw energy and emotions of the period, of alienation and urban life. There's a shared sensibility, a way of seeing the world through the lens of human experience.