Yury Kharchenko: Painting 2018–2023

Displays recent works by a contemporary painter who embraces imagery from pop culture to examine violence, genocide, and history. Painter Yury Kharchenko combines brilliant color with cerebral content to create his own highly individual pictorial language. This book presents and contextualizes his works from the past six years. A Jewish artist working in a time marked by growing anti-Semitism, Kharchenko’s most recent paintings vehemently assert his existence. While his earlier works largely invoked American abstract expressionism or referred to archaic and mythical symbols, many of his paintings today are characterized by iconography in which pop-cultural ideas and figures are mixed with fantasies of violence and taboo references to the Holocaust. The images raise provocative questions about ethics, guilt, and memory.