TitleBroken Code
Artist
Karen Kunc
(American, b. 1952)
Date1999
MediumColor woodcut on cream laid paper
DimensionsSheet size: 42 × 23 15/16 in.
Image size: 42 × 23 15/16 in.
Edition8/20
SignedSigned in graphite at LLE: "Karen Kunc '99 ©".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the Artist, 2004
Object number2004.23
Label TextColor woodcut printing has been the primary medium of Karen Kunc for nearly thirty years. A Nebraska native, Kunc studied printmaking at the University of Nebraska and after graduation continued her education at Ohio State University, receiving her MFA in 1977. She arrived at working with woodcuts circuitously after initially exploring etching, silkscreen, and lithography. She has been able to refine the woodcut technique, the oldest type of printmaking, to create abstract works that are not only deeply imbued with emotional, natural, and historical references, but are also works of very high technical skill. According to the artist, her woodcut prints are the product of a very personal reaction to forces in the outside world: "In my work, these formal ideas become symbolic abstractions, suggestive of landscape, unusual structures, or plant forms. . . . And the resulting artwork is a way to capture the creative choices, intensifying remembrances and concepts which become a subtext about the artist/creator and studio actions." Kunc uses a woodcut technique known as the color reduction process. Instead of using multiple carved blocks, one for each color, the reduction technique generally uses only one block to create the image. Kunc prefers birch or mahogany veneered plywood in which to carve her designs. The process involves numerous steps, and she often begins with stencils to create the initial design of the work, carving away areas of the block and inking only those specific areas with one or more colors. The print is then run through a press to create the first part of the impression. After carving and inking different areas of the block she runs it through the press again, adding new imagery to the print. This process may be repeated numerous times, and Kunc's prints often have forty or more different colors in them.
Kunc's work combines European modernism with traditional Japanese printmaking. By synthesizing forms that are reminiscent of both German Expressionism of the early twentieth century and seventeenth-century Japanese ukiyo-e prints she is able to create works of great subtlety and complexity. She has, according to one art historian, "affirmed links to Japanese pictorial design in her practice of abstraction from nature, sophisticated play of color, and complex integration of line, patter, and rhythmic motion within a composition." "Broken Code" is a lattice of repeated organic shapes that are at once referential to nature and suggestive of enigmatic ciphers. The work itself becomes something of a cryptograph, and as others have noted, the result is a print that does not replicate natural forces but instead becomes an analogy to their processes.
