Torn (It didn’t happen)

This painting by American artist Mira Schor was made at the full scale of the human body. The title, Torn: It Didn’t Happen, handwritten by Schor in red on the canvas itself, seems to refer both to the artist’s own personal sphere and to the contemporary world with all of its upheavals. 

The centre of the canvas is inhabited by a woman in a white dress. She is cleaved down the middle, bleeding out of both sides and revealing the space behind the canvas, that which lies outside the frame, in the museum and the world at large. This female figure torn in two doubles and accentuates the bipartite composition of the painting, with its two deeply symbolic chromatic spaces: a black of ink and death, and a red of blood and violence.