These paintings continue my exploration of Joseph Beuys’s body of work titled “Arena—Dove sarei arrivato se fossi stato intelligente! (Arena—where would I have got if I had been intelligent!).”  Arena consists of 264 black and white photographs mounted in 100 grey industrial style frames as displayed at the DIA Museum in Beacon, NY, from 2016 - 2018.  Arena, created from 1970 – 72, documents Beuys’s performances, concerts, actions, and key objects ranging from the late 1940’s to early 1970’s.  These photographs represent a fascinating portrait of Beuys‘s and his carefully constructed artistic persona. In translating these images into paintings, an uncanny representation of the real and the mysterious emerged.  The paintings depict multiple, at times unsettling, vacillating spaces, and picture planes, that to me, represent a metaphor for the mystery of Beuys. The paintings merge my vision with Beuys’s imagery and the museum institution that is revealed through my reflected and layered self-portrait silhouette.  The eleven paintings in this ongoing series seek to carefully mimic photographs of Beuys’s framed photographs reflected in a purgatorial space that is located somewhere between the real, representation and illusion.