Untitled

Joseph Kurhajec

Sculptor, painter, and printmaker Joseph Kurhajec grew up on a mink farm in Racine, Wisconsin, and owes a large part of his inspiration to a childhood spent not only around the continued cycle of life and death, but to the intimate familiarity of the animal transition from a live thing to an inanimate object, and all of the questions that transition presents.

In this untitled collagraph, we see Kurhajec’s innate desire to connect the physical to the theoretical: he has taken the discarded skins of reptiles and the hair of an unknown beast to press into the sheet, forming another, new life - perhaps a benevolent monster, who walks away from the viewer toward a world we cannot comprehend.