Otto Dix / Andra Ursuţa

If war can be rendered with horrifying specificity, it can also be depicted in the terrible anonymity of the dead or by landscapes stripped of their differentiating details by bombs. The German Expressionist Otto Dix, who served in the First World War, was a figurative artist, but he tipped into abstraction when revealing the innate Cubism of exploded structures or the grisly morass of decomposing bodies. At Egan and Rosen (a new partnership between the seasoned gallerists Mike Egan and Meredith Rosen), a group of Dix’s works—including the scratchy pencil drawing “Grenade Crater in a House,” from 1916, a precursor to the artist’s famed series “Der Krieg (The War)”—finds a contemporary soul mate in Andra Ursuţa’s 2007-17 series “Man from the Internet.” In her meticulous drawings, the Romanian artist copied (and recopied) an image of a corpse that she found on a Web site documenting Russian crimes during the Chechen wars. Grisly yet generic, these works are the heirs of Dix’s unsentimental project, demonstrating how atrocities are at once remembered and repressed. 

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