Study for Nougat 2 is a collage and acrylic work on paper made in 2010, at
precisely the moment Ghenie’s practice was gaining its first major international
recognition; the same year Pie Fight Interior II entered the collection of the
Centre Pompidou. Works on paper of this period are exceptional documents of
Ghenie’s working process: the collage elements, torn from photographic sources
and assembled with acrylic into compressed, unstable compositions, reveal the
source material and associative logic that his large scale paintings then absorb
and obscure. The mushroom cloud and the solitary figure standing before it are
characteristic Ghenie territory: the catastrophic image of twentieth century
violence held at a distance that implicates the viewer in the act of looking. Works
on paper by Ghenie from this period rarely appear on the market; his output in
the medium was concentrated in these early years and the works have been
closely held.