Untitled

The nightmarish qualities of Grassmann's Untitled draw upon rich, visual sources from nineteenth-century Symbolism to Surrealism. Prints by artists such as Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) and Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), for example, fused Romantic concerns with the conviction that evolution—as elaborated by Charles Darwin (1809-82)—would produce monstrosities as well as genetic progress. War and environmental destruction in the early twentieth century further transformed the way that artists perceived and depicted the relationship between human and animal worlds. Works like Grassmann's view the ontological intensification of these interactions between man and beast as a process both fantastical and terrifying.