The clear delineation of the black iPhone’s round edges and the precise rectangularframing of its image-laden screen stand in stark contrast to the painterly treatmentof the hands holding the device. With shades of pink, purple, yellow, red, and brown,Adrian Ghenie dissolves their skin into flesh. Particularly at the outlines of thefingers, the motif gives way to the medium of painting as the background’s blue attimes overlays the incarnate with quick brushstrokes and the squiggly contours arerepeated in a few swift lines on the image ground. “The App 3” provides a distillationof the artist’s engagement with the impact of screen technologies on the contemporaryworld.After depicting figures from both history and art history in the paintings thatgarnered him international renown, Ghenie turned to his present during the pandemic,when the liminal state of connection our digital devises offer us grew especiallypalpable: always being in touch, never touching. As the condition of our timemore generally, virtual bonds impact not just our psychological but also our physicaldisposition, culminating in historically specific postures. The hunched-over screenswiperof the 21st century appears repeatedly in Ghenie’s recent paintings, thoughsometimes only as fragment, as in the “App” series, from which the artist chose onework for his first TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition. The human silhouettes on the phone’sscreen – reminiscent of the grid interface of the dating app Grindr – become a selectionof potential connections available at the tip of the thumb.