Against marbleised paper, Carter has inked faceless profiles, silvery geodes and delicate drawings of eyeballs in his 2006 multimedia composition Untitled (2006 #52). The present work is part of a series of what the artist described as ‘anonymous portraits’, and although each portrait was drawn from a photograph, the person’s identity is entirely obscured and erased. To achieve the aqueous colour fields and rippling tones, Carter dips his paper into an oil and water solution, a process he sees as hands-off and somewhat mechanised. Inspired by artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg whose practice bridged abstraction and the visible world, Carter too is interested in collapsing divisions in mediums while exploring the relationship between identity and capitalism. The artist’s work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others, and he was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial exhibition Day for Night.

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