Landschaft mit Frau c. 1930

Karl Wiener made this landscape with a woman, and I immediately start thinking about the physical act of printing. See how the sky is a textured plane of blue? And the horizon line is repeated and built up with a dark slab of ink? I imagine Karl carefully carving away at the block to leave these shapes behind. How does the artist decide what to leave and what to take away? It feels like he was working with a limited palette, that’s for sure. Look at the way he balanced the darks of the trees and the figure with the bright negative space of the clouds and the horizon. I wonder if he was thinking about the German Expressionists or even some of the earlier woodblock prints from Japan. It's like we can feel Karl feeling his way through the medium, playing with the possibilities inherent in each mark and gesture, and carrying forward the conversation between artists across generations.