Cut Paper Drawing 1982

Frederick Sommer created this ‘Cut Paper Drawing’ with cut paper on board. The composition is immediately striking for its monochrome palette and the interplay of light and shadow, which gives depth to an otherwise flat medium. Sommer employs a strategy of defamiliarization, subverting our expectations of drawing. What we see is not a drawing in the traditional sense, but a constructed image where the act of cutting and arranging takes precedence. The shapes are biomorphic, hinting at organic forms, but they resist precise identification, challenging fixed meanings. The shadows cast by the cut paper create a secondary composition, a ghostly echo of the physical forms, destabilizing the relationship between object and representation. This work exists not as a representation of something but as an object in itself. Sommer invites us to consider the artwork's materiality and challenges us to reconsider the act of artistic creation as a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.