If, as Martha Graham said, “movement doesn’t lie,” then Wendy Artin’s large nudes are sustained moments of truth.  Her Olympian-scaled, fine-grained renderings of men and women bending, balancing, crouching, arching, and twisting – acrobatic poses well outside the usual studio repertoire – are not so much optical documents as kinesthetic experiences.  More than re-creating her subjects visually, she reconstitutes them physically.  Her empathy with her sitters – a corporeal identification transferred unmediated onto the viewer – is heightened by her drawings’ life-sized dimensions and by her avoidance of any outline or boundary that might separate these figures definitively from ourselves.  Artin’s charcoal pencil grazes so delicately over the paper that you feel the vital breath and light of her models, from the inside out.

Artin’s epic nudes exist simultaneously in the first and the third person.  Evidence of the artist’s eye is everywhere, but so is the figures’ visceral response to her all-seeing gaze.  Sensory associations, these supremely accomplished drawings remind us, lie as much in the torsion of a wrist or the flexion of a toe as in the taste of a madeleine or the scent of a hawthorn.  “Our legs and arms,” Proust wrote, “are full of torpid memories.”

Amy Fine Collins 2007