Word: woodcuts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first, Matthias Mansen's art seems oddly out of place at MIT. One wonders what these primitive-looking woodcuts, portraying simple domestic scenes, are doing in the glass and concrete confines of the List Visual Arts Center. The works, however, which Mansen did while living in New York between 1989 and 1992, subtly begin to show that they are far more contemporary than they first appear, that Mansen has reinvigorated the traditional art of woodcut printing under the 20th-century influences of cinema and collage, and in reaction to changes that have taken place in his first medium, painting...
Mansen himself, in Cambridge for the opening of the only American appearance of this show, looks less like a woodcut craftsman than the contemporary German artist that he is, dressed in the black suit and black turtleneck of the Continental avant-garde. Asked why he chose, in these works, to focus on domestic topics, Mansen responds: "When I was a student, everyone was painting crazy things, like giraffes in gas stations. That was fine to a point, but I wanted to do something different. There is something very simple, and familiar, to the domestic." Mansen explains that, even when working...
...pieces in the exhibition, "Studio," deals with Mansen's relationship to his art, in a scene less ostensibly "domestic" then the other subjects collected here. The piece simply displays the artist, printed in red, watching himself, printed in blue, chiseling himself, again printed in red, into a woodcut. "Studio," self-consciously enacting the artist's relationship to his art, seems to be more straight-forward than the other prints in showing Mansen's thoughts on his art. Here, the artist and his act of creation take preeminence over their own subject in a way that is less obvious, though perhaps...
...Mansen's art, since, as he says and a work like Studio implies, his subject, ultimately, is the artistic object itself. Mansen speaks convincingly of the care he takes in choosing the discarded lumber and furniture he uses to make his wood blocks, how the difficult process of woodcut creates a beneficial restraint that painting lacks. One cannot even begin to describe a work like "Das Haus" (The House), three 24-foot prints which depict all the residents of a house, and their activities. Mansen comments: "Over the past 15 years I've made occasional retreats into painting, but when...
...Rape of a Young Woman" has more uniform hatching lines and intense detail, while the remarkable and dark engraving "A Knight, Death and the Devil" contains more varied and subtle tones. The etching falls between the dramatically expressive and provocative engraving and the folk art-like crudity of the woodcut...