"All the Work I do Is in My Neck" from Images from a Locked Ward

Michael Mazur

1963–65, published 1965

A lithograph that confronts the viewer with a distorted, anguished head and tangled neck—Mazur's attempt to make visible the psychological pain and confinement of patients in a locked psychiatric ward.

A single, oversized head tilts across the page in dense smudges and frantic, wiry strokes set against a soft, scraped background, while the lower form dissolves into empty paper, making the figure feel both weighted and precariously insubstantial.

Part of the Images from a Locked Ward series, this print helped shift mid‑20th‑century printmaking toward raw, expressionistic depictions of mental illness and used lithography as a vehicle for social and psychological critique.

Palette

Art Terms

Lithography Print Expressionism Figurative Portrait Gestural Monochrome

Exhibitions

Works from Change, Inc.

1974

New Photography 5: Vincent Borrelli, Thomas Florschuetz, Mike Mandel

1989

International Sculpture Competition: The Unknown Political Prisoner

1953

The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age

1968