Flood - Kakhovka Dam

Michael Rosenthal (American, b. 1946, California)
Flood — Kakhovka Dam, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
8 × 10 inches; 20 × 25.5 cm

A solitary figure sits in a small boat beneath the stark vertical of a mast, adrift on luminous blue-green waters. Painted in the weeks following the 2023 destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam — an act that flooded thousands of homes and displaced entire communities — the work distills an immense humanitarian catastrophe into a single, quietly devastating image.