CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/24/2015

Drawing People

"Sleeper 02 (Vintage Hat)," Chloe Piene's 2005 charcoal drawing on vellum, is reproduced from Drawing People, launching tomorrow night at the Drawing Center with a lecture and signing featuring Piene and Dasha Shishkin. Author Roger Malbert writes, "Analogies abound in Chloe Piene’s graphic works: between Eros and death, the human and the animal, and drawing and masturbation. Naked, skinny women – possibly self-portraits – recline or sprawl, isolated in space, the contours of their bodies traced in tremulous charcoal lines that sometimes digress to reveal the skeletal frame beneath the skin’s surface. Skulls, grinning malevolently, are juxtaposed with rounded breasts, and bony fingers intimately caress flesh. This morbid meditation on death is evocative of the Mexican Day of the Dead and of the allegorical danse macabre or ‘dance of death’ of medieval Europe – in fact, it is the Northern European tradition with which the artist claims the closest artistic affinity. Her drawings could seem trite, yet the bodies are so sensitively and vivaciously drawn: a wavering line scoops up the contour of an arm and then floats away loosely into what may be a string of small bones, the beads of a necklace or pure abstraction."