THE HECUBA CYCLE

The Hecuba Series is executed within the classical study technique of Modernism. Paul Cézanne is said to have used only a single pencil—or rather, a single grade of hardness—per drawing for his works in graphite. Why is this a crucial observation? Because it allows us to perceive that the artist’s tool, as an intuitively guided extension of the painter’s arm, becomes an integral part of his own being. The versatility of the line, the subtle tonal modulation of grays, the variations in velocity, the precise accentuations, and the effortless transition between linear and planar description are stirrings that arise directly from the intuitively guided hand. 

This reveals that the objective of modernist masters was not complacent formal fulfillment, but absolute immediacy and authenticity within the creative act of structure.

The modernist painter utilizes the monistic instrument of graphite as intuitively as a singer employs their voice or a dancer their body: the graphite pencil serves as a testament to the transition of classical drawing into an autonomous modernist painterly stance. 

Particularly within this specific technique, the intuitive power of the artist becomes binding and manifest. The reminiscence of Cézanne through this moninstrumental execution is by no means nostalgic backwardness. It is a relentless discipline that a contemporary modernist artist imposes upon himself to ensure that the spark of the great masters does not diminish within an era of superficial aestheticism.

Hecuba is the tragic protagonist of the ancient tragic poet Euripides (5th century BC). She gives her name to the tragedy Hecuba and stands as the central pillar within The Trojan Women. The play depicts Troy after its capitulation and the victory of the Greeks: when all men and male children have been systematically killed by the Greeks and the surviving women are forced into slavery, it falls upon Queen Hecuba of Troy, through her mere presence, to reflect upon what human, moral, or societal stance remains possible in the face of a completely annihilated society. 

A shattering moment within The Trojan Women is that in which Hecuba reacts to the news that her grandson Astyanax—the last living male Trojan—will be killed. 

The genocidal intent of the victory-drunk Greeks is consummated with this act. The total collapse of humanity becomes manifest. 

What stance, what words are left at this moment? Which word would be even possible? A fundamental inquiry that renders Hecuba a literary figure that could not be more relevant to our contemporary present. 

What words do we possess today? 

Over 2,300 years later, the artist's studies become a frequently repeated, piercing interrogation of the figure Hecuba. 

 What remains in the face of the human readiness for genozide? 

Ist es  

• Is it the dignity of a former queen, echoing beyond the collapse of her people, offering the survivors the illusion of cultural stability?
• Is it her maternal solace, absorbing the pain of her daughters and existentially sharing the loss of sons, fathers, and brothers?
• Is it the sheer terror and dread of her fate, now degraded to being a mere birth apparatus for a foreign people, whereby the consummated genocide ritually manifests itself further upon their bodies?
• Is it the helplessness and rage in the face of an unchecked boundlessness that unleashes itself upon them in destructive violence?
• Is it just hope—a glimmering remnant of it—which, however, in the very second it appears natural, reveals itself within the paradox of its essence to be entirely futile?
• Or is it just the illusion of enduring dignity; a sympathetic grief and irrational hope as the last remaining duty of the representative and projection surface of an already extinguished people.

Bernhard Karlowitz has cultivated his intuitive-gestural line—against the resistance of academic admissions systems, against the complacency of gallery aesthetics, and against the thoroughly financialized market of funding and awards—since his decision to pursue professional art in 1991. He works within the tradition of Modernism directly from the experiential moment. The act of experience and the act of creation are one. 

Within every single work of the Hecuba Series from the year 2025, the artistic expression shifts by a delicate nuance, finds new nuances of expression. 

It is precisely these nuances of expressive shifts that characterize the series as a total oeuvre: subtle shifts of artistical expression that dare to go beyond the wordlessness of impossible answers. 

The Cézannian monomateriality of his technique is submerged into other spheres upon the dark gray paper. It allows the Hecuba figure to appear, granting her an unobtrusively theatrical moment, which in several works is formally highlighted once more through loose pigments, brushwork, or pastel highlights. 

Within the form finding process, defined by the artists choice of materials and his specifically trained artist´s hand and sensitivity — the Hecuba Cycle positions itself outside current events—it is poetically universal. Yet, in approaching his art, its radical currency unfolds; it is stated and lamented in an epochal manner.

Karlowitz refuses the constantly shifting thematic occupation of contemporary pseudo-themes that has become symptomatic of the art machinery of our time. 

As to Bernhard Karlowitz, art stands above time and outside the artist himself. 

In his large cycles dedicated to Narcissus, Orpheus, and Le Faune au soir, Karlowitz found his own ways to place the pain of our era into a poetically superior context. He consistently continues this path with the Hecuba Series. 

Katharine Hepburn was one of the preeminent film and theater actresses of the 20th century. She assumed the role of Hecuba in 1971. The Greek director Michael Cacoyannis made the realization of the entire film project dependent upon her acceptance. He knew that the legendary actress, at that point in her career, was uniquely capable of combining the foundation of classical English theater and American epic drama with an unobtrusive, unpretentious art before the camera. 

Hecuba forms the center of a monumental female ensemble; she is the bracket that holds the piece together. Hepburn was arguably the only diva of her era who could suppress her own theatrical repertoire so deeply to radically capture the helpless and futilely lamenting lethargy of the Hecuba figure, while simultaneously leading the most impressive ensemble of actresses of the mid-century (Irene Papas, Geneviève Bujold, Vanessa Redgrave), each appearing in their greatest dramatic power. 

Without selfishly exploiting her own dramatic scale, she unifies this highly dramatic collective. The artistic tightrope walk of not drowning representationally in the process, and yet guaranteeing the cohesion of the work, is masterfully achieved by Katharine Hepburn. 

She does not merely act—rather, she allows the vanishing dignity of the fallen queen to manifest through the sheer resonance of her fading posture, which she embodies and radiates rather than simply performs. 

The deliberately bold contrast of her portrayal of royalty becomes all the more striking when one recalls her dynamic, powerful portrait of Eleanor of Aquitaine, with which she had brillated in a completely contrary dramatic dimension just two years prior.