Untitled

This unique print comes from a group of 36 works De Sana prepared for, but never delivered to, a collector in the late 1980s. By 1985, De Sana had been diagnosed with AIDS and in a related illness had his spleen removed. Incorporating more collage elements into his images in the last five years of his life (he passed away in 1990), De Sana also moved away from his previously ebullient and playful nude figure studies in theatrical tableaux to make more tightly cropped images, such as this study of a man's head shot through with a bloom of blade-like shapes (achieved through multiple printing the abstract shapes over the image). With its vaguely sickening green cast over a face with downturned eyes, as if looking inside himself, De Sana's reckoning with mortality make this image very powerful and disturbing.