Phantasmagoric smears of ultramarine, crimson, and white obliterate the visage of a fugitive Nazi officer in Adrian Ghenie’s The Uncle of 2019, which sees Ghenie’s deft facture and psychological intensity at their very best. At once melding the squeegee scrape of Gerhard Richter's post-photographic abstraction with the corporeal deformity of a Francis Bacon portrait, The Uncle extends Ghenie’s career-long interrogation of the twentieth century’s most deplorable characters, many of whom were the focus of the artist’s lauded exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. As figure and environment implode into one another, this nightmarish vignette of European dictatorship and its atrocities uncovers palimpsestic allusions to an artistic and historical past in Ghenie’s decisive synthesis of personal and collective memory.
Ghenie's striking masterpiece is on offer as part of The Now Evening Auction taking place at Sotheby's New York on 13 May 2024.
