Centaur and Woman 1961

This is Rico Lebrun's "Centaur and Woman", and it’s a lithograph, so made with grease on a stone, which is a process that loves velvety blacks and greys. Lebrun’s got a really interesting way of building up the image; it's all about the push and pull of dark and light, which really gives you a sense of figures emerging from the shadows. The way he scratches into the surface to define the forms reminds me of drawing with charcoal, where you’re constantly adding and subtracting. There’s this spot right where the woman’s back meets the centaur's flank, and the lines there are so dense and frantic, it's like the whole image is vibrating with energy. It almost doesn't matter what the image is of, the lines alone have a kind of raw emotionality. He's in conversation with artists like Kathe Kollwitz, who used printmaking to express the suffering of ordinary people. Ultimately, what Lebrun is doing here feels less like representation and more like an act of pure, unbridled expression.