Mark Greenwold

Greenwold is best known for his complex, carefully calibrated paintings of figures in interior spaces. At the beginning of his career, in the mid-1970s, he became notorious for his sometimes controversial representations of sex and violence. The present drawing, which shows a struggle between a man and a woman, follows this theme. In a 2014 interview, he said: "I have always been interested in violence in my work. ... In the 1960s, when I was developing as an artist, one of the things that interested me most was film. Great European and American filmmakers like Orson Welles and Bergman and Antonioni were making films about human concerns. Why would you leave any of that out? Why would you leave out the power of Greek tragedy?"