Pictorial Disruption
In Pictorial Disruption, Denise Hawrysio combines stochastic mark-making directly onto etching plates—a technique central to her practice since her earliest experiments in print—with pencil-drawn portraits of women who have navigated significant personal or social struggles. The subjects form a distinct lineage, encompassing members of the artist’s own family alongside a collective of historical figures and feminist icons, including Shulamith Firestone, Nawal El Saadawi, Nico, Andrea Dworkin, Valerie Solanas, Hannah Arendt, Emily Carr, and Lucia Berlin. Together, the works celebrate lives defined by courage, principle, and self-determination.
By integrating the rawness and inherent “messiness” of the aleatory marks, Hawrysio deliberately disrupts normative readings of portraiture. The intervention of this unpredictable process challenges traditional expectations of the genre, rendering the subjects both fragile and resilient.
