Egon Schiele

Schiele drew the body as if skin were too thin to hide the soul. He was young, brilliant, provocative, and often scandalous. In Vienna after Klimt, he stripped away gold and ornament, leaving angular limbs, exposed flesh, twisted hands, and eyes that meet the viewer without comfort.

His figures are erotic, vulnerable, and wounded. He painted himself obsessively, not from vanity alone, but as investigation. What is a body when desire, shame, illness, and death pass through it?

Schiele died at twenty-eight during the influenza pandemic, three days after his pregnant wife. His short life left images that still feel dangerously alive.