A Thousand Cuts

Duration: 14.06.2025-TBA

“Death by a thousand cuts” has entered the vernacular as an expression to signify a long period of suffering. It originates from an ancient Chinese death penalty (admittedly, the name leaves very little to the imagination), but for most people, it will instead evoke a song from Taylor Swift:

Saying goodbye is death by a thousand cuts
Flashbacks waking me up
I get drunk, but it’s not enough
‘Cause the morning comes and you’re not my baby

The exhibition “A Thousand Cuts” presents works by three artists who employ the human body as a liminal point between “inner,” “outer,” and “other.” In their respective practices, Minda Andrén, Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin and Marianne Vlaschits, have been dissecting the human body in different manners and from various angles.

Andréns recent work depicts figures touching each other, massaging, making out. The touch and intimacy in these paintings are interrupted in the thousands of fine cuts and tears on the surface of the canvas that spreads across the painted image, threatening its corporal integrity. Intimacy, desire and well-being intertwine with questions of power hierarchies. In the midst of these questions, we find the protagonists tirelessly groping at one another.

Dumoulin has been working with skeletons for the better part of two years, exploring the contemporary relevance of the genre of Danse Macabre. Recently, he became interested in juxtaposing flamboyance to cruelty, and began adding knights to his scenes. Those are not the “knight in shining armor types. Rather, Dumoulin is interested in the ferocity of self- righteousness, in the lack of empathy that comes with ideological zeal, in the camaraderie and complicity that is formed when a group engages in acts of wanton violence. Skeletons and knights; death incarnate and death-givers, going about their business, enjoying their day while ruining everybody else’s.

Marianne Vlaschits’s works deal with the visualization of internal states of perception and sensation. In her paintings she moves through feelings of sickness, hallucination and pleasure. In this way the paintings become diagrams of her physical condition. But Vlaschits has also been working on actual diagrams, slicing up the painterly practice, in an effort at better understanding the experience of painting —the headspace, the haptic dimension, the despair— that has the painter addicted to the process. The diagrams, a form of auto-ethnography, are an effort to solve the riddle of what kind of dark magic is conjured when we apply pigments on a surface.

The exhibition is supported by Bildrecht. Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin is currently a holder of the BMWKM’s working stipend for Fine Arts.