Stilleven met vis en kan 1893 - 1941

This etching by Ludwig Marcoussis depicts a still life with a fish and a jug, using a monochromatic palette and geometric forms. Just imagine the artist, bent over the plate, carefully layering those cross-hatched lines to conjure form and texture, shifting and adjusting as the image slowly emerges. I can almost feel the artist trying to make sense of the world through these fractured shapes. What’s it like to try and capture the slippery, scaly, and very dead reality of a fish? The artist is in conversation with the still life paintings of Cezanne and Picasso, abstracting objects and collapsing space. The etching is like a diagram or an exercise. And each mark seems like a question about how we see. It reminds me that art is never really finished, it just keeps going, changing, and answering back through time.