Female Nude Before a Cabinet 1916

This is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s woodcut, Female Nude Before a Cabinet. Its bold graphic style really pushes at the boundaries of representation. It's like Kirchner is saying, "How little can I do to show a person and their space?" Look at how he uses the woodcut technique. It's not about detail, but about these decisive gouges and lines that define the forms, like the sharp angles of her face and the flat planes of the cabinet. It's a process of both adding and subtracting, and there is a directness here, in this carving out of the image. The high contrast, the texture of the wood grain, and the dynamic composition gives the image a kind of nervous energy. The image reminds me a little of Edvard Munch's work, and the way that he too was interested in expressing a sense of psychological drama through the simplification of form. It shows that art is all about exchange, about learning, and finding our own voices in relation to one another.