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2007 Summer

Dorota Jurczak and Abel Auer: The Macabre Line

Elna Svenle

Dorota Jurczak

Untitled

2006

Ink and egg tempera on linen

23.6x19.6 inches

Collection David Beitzel, New York

Dorota Jurczak and Abel Auer’s draw­ings and etchings are filled with black humor, bizarre characters, and dreamlike settings verging on the nightmarish. Terms that come to mind when encountering their works are macabre and grotesque, the former a charac­terization of artistic works with a deliberate ghastly atmosphere, the latter a 15th century description of wall paintings featuring strange animal figures, however here used in its com­mon meaning of fantastic or bizarre.

Since the Early Renaissance, the gro­tesque and macabre have been featured in artistic imagery to express religious beliefs, social anxieties, cultural criticism, or inner psychological states. As opposed to the art­ists of previous centuries, contemporary art­ists such as Auer and Jurczak have no explicit agenda in their work. Instead their works are platforms for vivid imaginations and explora­tions into the history of fantastical visual cul­ture. The motifs are often in a state between the frightening and the humorous, and sel­dom further away from reality than what we can relate to.

Significant for both historical and con­temporary artists exploring the macabre and grotesque is the reoccurring use of drawing and printmaking in doing so. This may be a result of the immediacy and detailed qual­ity of the line, which easily lends itself to narration. As one of the earliest modes of representation, drawing may also be the mode of artistic expression closest to the subconscious. Early examples of this relation­ship are Hieronymus Bosch’s drawings of de­mons and human-animal hybrids, intended to portray man’s moral failure; Hans Holbein the Younger’s woodcut series Dance of Death, functioning as a memento mori during the frequent plagues of the 16th Century; Fran­cisco Goya’s The Disasters of War, a series of aquatints made in response to the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, and his equally unsettling The Caprices, a series of bizarre engravings and aquatints, satirizing religion, ignorance, morality, marriage, and superstition.

In the late 1800s, the tradition to express the grotesque and macabre in drawing was upheld by artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, James Ensor, and Alfred Kubin. Beardsley’s ink illustrations for magazines and books are famous for their sinister and perverse representations of historical and mythologi­cal themes, such as Oscar Wilde’s tragedy Salomé, based on the Biblical story, and the ancient Greek anti-war comedy Lysistrata. Ensor employed a personal fantastic style as a satire of the irrationalities of human exis­tence. Kubin, whose symbolic artistic visions explored the dark land of nightmares, illus­trated books by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He also wrote several novels himself, including The Other Side, a dystopic fantasy with a claustrophobic atmosphere.

Auer’s drawings, often portraying playful hybrids of trees, animals, and humans, reveal a close connetion to Kubin’s The Other Side and fantastical book illustrations such as those mentioned above. In Jurczak’s meticulously made etchings, bizarre creatures, such as an­thropomorphized birds and spiders, carry out morbid rituals. Another contemporary artist who appropriates a similar aesthetic is Marcel Dzama, making ink and watercolor drawings of people disguised as trees, fantastical crea­tures playing instruments, and Henry Darger­esque girls parading with weapons. There are no clear narratives in these artists’ works, yet menace is ever present.

The grotesque and macabre have been the subject of numerous prominent artists. The motifs may have been considered con­frontational at the time of their making, but as art curator Robert Storr suggested in the catalogue for the 5th Site Santa Fe Biennial, recent exhibition based on the concept of the grotesque, rather than “regard it as either charming or regrettable digression from the greatness of tradition … it is more useful and more accurate to think of the grotesque as full-fledged, multi-layered counter-tradition, powerful current that continuously stirs calm­er waters, sometimes redirecting their flow.”

1 Storr, Robert, Disparities & Deforma­tions: Our Grotesque: the Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial, 2004, p. 13.