Twee koeien 1900 - 1917

Adriaan Korteweg made this woodcut called 'Two Cows,' sometime between 1905 and 1917. The solid blacks and whites show a process of reduction, the cutting away of material to reveal the image, a kind of sculptural drawing. There’s a brutal quality to the shapes, the way they’re carved, which gives the image a powerful presence. Look at the lower cow's legs, they're almost like shattered pieces of bone. It feels like the image is constantly shifting, alive with movement. The artist is really playing with negative space here. Take the clouds, are they clouds, or part of the cows themselves? This reminds me of some of Franz Marc’s woodcuts, where animals are simplified into abstract shapes and lines, but there’s a raw quality here, perhaps owing to the directness of the medium, where any mistake is part of the process. Like any good artwork, the meaning keeps moving, always open to interpretation.