Mask Dance 1929

This is Kirchner’s Mask Dance, an oil on canvas, though the date is unknown, you can see the work is as much about the process of painting, as it is about any kind of representation. The colours are bold and strange. The texture has a rough quality, like you can almost feel the grain of the canvas underneath. Look at the bottom right - how the artist renders the foot, each toe clearly defined, like the strokes of a brush. And these aren’t the colors of real life: the bodies are pink and blue, which gives the picture a surreal, almost dreamlike quality. I think of other early expressionist painters like Edvard Munch, who used colors in a similarly bold, emotional way. And like Munch, Kirchner isn’t trying to give us answers; he’s inviting us to ask questions and see the world in new ways.