Wax Quintuplet

Chloe Piene’s figurative drawings are part depiction and part emotional catharsis, essentially self-referential investigations of the body’s physical and erotic nature. Delicate and brutal, forensic and fantastic, her drawings feature spindly, agitated lines that describe highly abstracted figures set in amorphous space, here fragmentary figures showing only portions of the head and nude torso. This suite of drawings is related to Piene’s sculptural busts rendered in wax or plasteline modeling clay. Many are memento mori (reminders of death) featuring fragmentary, often skeletal forms that suggest decay and the fleeting nature of life.