[no title] 1990

Curator: This is an untitled print by Christopher Le Brun, held in the Tate Collections. Editor: Oh, wow, it’s moody. Dark and kind of… turbulent. Like looking into a stormy night. Curator: The stark contrast immediately brings to mind issues of representation in art, especially abstraction and the male gaze. How does this seemingly chaotic composition navigate the history of power dynamics in visual culture? Editor: I dunno about all that, but the texture is amazing. You can almost feel the ink, heavy and kind of scraped across the surface. It’s like he’s fighting with the image, trying to pull something out of the darkness. Curator: Yes, the gestural quality of the marks could be interpreted as resistance against the formal constraints of printmaking. Editor: Maybe. Or maybe he just wanted to make something cool. It worked for me.