Figures
This conversation is connected to Figures.
Adler made Figures during his final years in England, between 1946 and 1949. Two pale, skeletal forms face each other against a flat black ground, their bodies built from cracked and layered paint in cream, gold, olive, and touches of red. The figures are barely human — elongated, fragmented, with heads that look more like masks or skulls. Adler had learned by this point that his entire family in Poland had been killed in the Holocaust. He spent these last years in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, supported by a patron, painting figures that became increasingly stripped-down and spectral. He died in 1949 at fifty-three.