Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot

ABOUT THE WORK

“The human anatomy has fascinated me ever since I was a child,” Ronald Ventura said in a 2011 interview for his show at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York. This fascination for the human body followed him well into his adulthood and even bled into his art – throughout the years, Ventura has developed a predilection for depicting the human body juxtaposed against dark images. In his 1999 Transpose, Ventura expertly manipulates shadows and depth as he depicts a man hanging upside down in an apparent approximation – though not a faithful replication – of The Hanged Man, with his hands wrapped around a knee. His face is upturned and his eyes are closed, denoting the man’s despair, his trials, and his self-sacrifice. “[The] basis of [Ventura’s] art is his mastery of the anatomy,” writes critic Alice Guillermo in Human Study and the Politics of Gender as recalled in the book Realities: Ronald Ventura. “He has assumed the capability of distorting the human body, clothed or unclothed, or of morphing it in the most unexpected ways.” (Hannah Valiente)