Ansel Krut is a London-based painter best known for his expressive compositions and grotesque forms, which draw from both from art history and his upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa. Born to a Jewish family who fled Eastern Europe prior to World War II and settled in a tight-knit diasporic community in Cape Town, Krut creates visceral works that suggest the vivid colors and dramatic landscapes of his hometown while gesturing at the complex status of his position as a white settler—which he calls his "confused cultural identity"—in a society marked by apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism. His gestural renderings of suspended body parts, still lifes, and architectural scenes are imbued with a type of psychedelic absurdity, their joy nonetheless qualified by undertones of existential melancholy. His largescale 2017 canvas Red Hand, Violet Hand is charged with a type of raw immediacy, in which abstraction and figuration function as both formal experiment and coded social commentary.