Same/Different (Homage to Jawlensky)

I wrote in my blog post last week about my inspiration for the mask piece. It goes back to an exhibition I saw a long time ago in Germany featuring works of the painter Alexej von Jawlensky (1864-1941). He was a Russian expressionist painter who worked mainly in Germany and Switzerland. He was associated with Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Henri Matisse, and later exhibited with Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger.

From 1918 onwards Jawlensky worked on a series of highly stylized portraits and developed a protoform of geometrical, abstract heads. This was his obsession for at least 10 years until arthritis crippled him so much that he couldn’t paint anymore. During that time the heads became very stylized, formal and symmetrical. He called those works “Constructivist Heads”.

These heads with their formal, abstract and uniform features reminded me of masks.

The human face is reduced to a minimalistic set of features, but within those formal restrictions there is individuality, expressed by colours and some details. We each have two eyes, a nose and a mouth, but are still distinctive individuals!

I quilted the basic head shapes all around the three main panels: