Otto Dix & Andra Ursuţa

Mike Egan and Meredith Rosen are pleased to present Otto Dix / Andra Ursuţa, the first exhibition at Egan and Rosen. The show features thirteen works made between 1915 and 2016, juxtaposing foundational examples of Dix’s wartime sketches and Weimar era portraits with works from Ursuta’s monumental series of ink drawings, Man From The Internet.

Otto Dix (1891-1969) was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of the brutality of war as well as works both highly critical and romantically engaged with German society during the Weimar Republic. Dix fought in the trenches in World War I, and made many works during the war on paper he carried with him. After the war, Dix fully engaged with the art scenes in Dresden and Berlin, painting both the most iconic portrait of the sex and death obsessed Weimar era, Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, and the most brutal anti-war work ever made - the series of etchings titled Der Krieg. The Nazis had Dix fired from his post at the Dresden Academy, and Dix’s paintings The Trench and War Cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937 in Munich. In 1939 Dix was arrested on false charges of conspiring to kill Hitler. He was released and conscripted into the Volkssturm, and was eventually captured by the French. After the war, Dix returned to work and live in Dresden. Dix died in 1969 in Singen, Germany. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, among many others.

Andra Ursuța is an American artist born in Romania in 1979. Working across mediums but best known as a sculptor, Ursuța has in a very short time produced several bodies of highly accomplished and critically praised, often controversial work. Ursuța’s series of ink drawings, Man from the Internet, depicts an alleged Chechen corpse lying in a forest. Drawn by Ursuța compulsively over and over again, each drawing is an absurdist attempt to copy the contents of the internet, with the artist reimagining the unseen details of the low resolution source material in a new unique color of ink each time. Drawing with tiny marks built up into a hallucinatory preciousness, each drrawing has the ghastly clarity and silent immobility of a dream. Her work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the New Museum, the ICA Miami, the Kunsthalle Basel, the Hammer Museum, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, as well as two monographs: Alps, published by the New Museum; and Andra Ursuța, published by the Deste Foundation. Ursuța’s work was featured in the 55th Venice Biennale, the 13th Biennale de Lyon, the 15th Istanbul Biennial, and the 58th Venice Biennale. A solo exhibition by Ursuța will open at David Zwirner’s gallery in Paris on September 4, 2021. She lives and works in New York.