Expanding Force 1974

Werner Drewes made this abstract woodcut print called Expanding Force. The gray and black palette gives a subdued, almost industrial feel. I can imagine Drewes carving into the wood, the give and take of the blade, the physical act of cutting mirroring the intellectual process of abstraction. The shapes are both hard-edged and organic, and there's this feeling of depth, like the planes are shifting and sliding. Those vertical bars in the center—are they architecture, or some kind of futuristic scaffolding? Maybe it's a skyscraper. It reminds me of early modernists, like the Bauhaus artists, who were also trying to find a new visual language to express the modern world. You see them grappling with the same question: how to represent movement, speed, and the fragmented experience of contemporary life. Artists are always talking to each other, across time and space, riffing on each other's ideas, and pushing the boundaries of what painting can be.