Giant Chickens

From 1902, Alfred Kubin exhibited his works in prestigious Berlin and Viennese galleries, shortly he joined Phalanx – an avant−garde group of artists in Munich. In 1900–1905, in some kind of ecstatic excitation, he made several hundred drawings. These works addressed the themes of death, menacing female sexuality, strange beasts and other bizarre subjects. He worked up some of the motifs into series of images, while other themes remained solitary, without losing their impact on the viewer’s feeling of anxiety and foreboding of the depicted events’ ominous development. Many of his drawings show various creatures in superior and enlarged positions to the human figures. The artist achieved a strong visual effect by disrupting customary forms with naïve stylization. Like in this drawing Giant Chickens from 1905, the paradoxical narrative is centred on the moment of mutual surprise of its protagonists, the Red Indian with a dagger and the fascinating, huge chickens in search of food. The artist employed his favourite ink−spray technique to endow the scene with a velvety, out−of−focus impression.