Hinged Head 1974

Sorel Etrog made this drawing, Hinged Head, with colored pencil, on paper. The man has got hinges for eyes, hinges for a nose, hinges for ears! It’s like Etrog is saying something about how our perceptions are constructed, put together piece by piece. I love how the drawing is so precise, so deliberate. I can imagine Etrog carefully considering each line, each angle, as if he’s building a machine, a thinking machine. I think back to Picasso, Picabia, and Duchamp, with their mechanical drawings. Etrog is in conversation with them. But his hinges also suggest movement, flexibility. Maybe he's telling us that our identities, our heads, are not fixed, that they can be opened up, reconfigured. I think about the push and pull of abstraction and representation, and how Etrog invites us to question how we see, how we understand the world around us.