Exodus 1967 - 1968

Oskar Kokoschka made this print, Exodus, without a specific date, using etching, drypoint, and engraving on paper. Just looking at it, I imagine Kokoschka’s hand moving quickly, scratching into the plate. The image is a flurry of lines, like a raw nerve exposed. The faces staring out at us from the bottom half, they're like masks, or maybe they're the faces of people fleeing, desperate. I feel like I can sense him there, caught in a moment of frenzied, furious creation. The way he digs into the surface, it’s almost violent. The figures are stripped bare, and the landscape feels desolate. Maybe he's thinking about the trauma and displacement of war, or about the pain of being human, or the act of fleeing itself. Kokoschka is in conversation with other expressionist painters like Munch and Kirchner, all wrestling with ways to capture emotion, the turmoil of the modern world. But he’s doing it in his own way, with this raw, urgent mark-making. And for us, looking at it now, it’s still unsettling, still alive. It leaves a mark.