Haunted by the surreal presence of a monumental head lurking above, the protagonist of Adrian Ghenie’s Alpine Retreat 2 lies in repose, only to be obliterated by his signature pastose, magmic drags of cerulean, white, and scarlet paint. Executed in 2017, the present work is the sister painting to The Alpine Retreat, which dates to the year prior and today resides in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Together, these works see the artist’s facture, psychological inquiry, and revisionist reconsiderations reach their apogee, representing the apex of Ghenie’s uncompromising subversions of twentieth-century history painting, a subject which served as the focus of the artist’s critically acclaimed presentation at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The present work depicts a pregnant Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's mistress, at their Bavarian mountain chalet. Her anachronistic depiction—the pair never conceived a child—proffers an ideological birth more than a literal one: reflecting on a legacy of global extremism, the proliferation of hate speech, and discourse regarding the health of democracy around the world, Alpine Retreat 2 becomes more resonant and relevant with each passing year. Marrying formal gesture and historical heft, Ghenie reconciles allegory and abstraction in one of the most arresting and irrefutably important paintings of his career.

The NOW & Contemporary Evening Auction is presented in partnership with CELINE, live at Sotheby’s New York on 15 May at 7:30 PM EST.